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DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 

FROM A PAINTING BY G. F. WATTS. R.A. 



MEMORIES 
AND IMPRESSIONS 

A STUDY IN ATMOSPHERES 

BY 

FORD MADOX HUEFFER 

ILLUSTRATED 




HARPER 6" BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

M C M X I 



« 



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COPYRIGHT. I9II, BV HARPER & BROTHERS 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
PUBLISHED MARCH. ISII 



^/. Uo 



©CLA^SGOS^ 



"A hundred years went by, and what was 
left of his haughty and proud people full of 
free passions ? They and all their genera- 
tions had passed away." 

— Pushkin {Sardanapalus). 



CONTENTS 

CHAP, PAGE 

Dedication ix 

I. The Inner Circle i 

II. The Outer Ring 21 

III. Gloom and the Poets 38 

IV. Christina Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelite 

Love 60 

V. Music and Masters 78 

VI. Pre-Raphaelites and Prisons 106 

VII. Anarchists and Gray Frieze 133 

VIII. Various Conspirators 161 

IX. Poets and Presses 175 

X. A Literary Deity 197 

XI. Deaths and Departures 218 

XII. Heroes and Some Heroines 250 

XIII. Changes 279 

XIV. And Again Changes 300 

XV. Where We Stand 318 

Index 331 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI Frontispiece 

FORD MADOX BROWN Facingp. 4 



SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES . . 
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
JAMES m'nEILL WHISTLER . . 

JOHN RUSKIN 

CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI . . . 

FRANZ LISZT 

JOSEPH JOACHIM 

WILLIAM MORRIS 

DOUGLAS JERROLD 

THOMAS HARDY 

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT .... 

HOLMAN HUNT 

SIR JOHN MILLAIS 

THOMAS CARLYLE 



24 
28 

32 

64 

74- 

80 

102 

134 

178 
198 
204 
232 
240 
320 



"M' 



DEDICATION 

TO CHRISTINA AND KATHARINE 

Y Dear Kids— Accept this book, the best 
Christmas present that I can give you. You 
will have received before this comes to be printed, or 
at any rate before— bound, numbered, and presum- 
ably indexed— it will have come in book form into 
your hands— you will have received the amber neck- 
laces and the other things that are the outward 
and visible sign of the presence of Christmas. But 
certain other things underlie all the presents that a 
father makes to his children. Thus there is the spir- 
itual gift of heredity. 

"It is with some such idea in my head— with the 
idea, that is to say, of analyzing for your benefit what 
my heredity had to bestow upon you— that I began this 
book. That, of course, would be no reason for mak- 
ing it a 'book,' which is a thing that appeals to many 
thousands of people, if the appeal can only reach 
them. But to tell you the strict truth, I made for 
myself the somewhat singular discovery that I can 
only be said to have grown up a very short time ago— 



IX 



DEDICATION 



perhaps three months, perhaps six. I discovered that 
I had grown up only when I discovered quite sudden- 
ly that I was forgetting my own childhood. My own 
childhood was a thing so vivid that it certainly in- 
fluenced me, that it certainly rendered me timid, in- 
capable of self-assertion, and, as it were, perpetually 
conscious of original sin, until only just the other 
day. For you ought to consider that upon the one 
hand as a child I was very severely disciplined, and, 
when I was not being severely disciplined, I moved 
among somewhat distinguished people who all ap- 
peared to me to be morally and physically twenty-five 
feet high. The earliest thing that I can remember is 
this, and the odd thing is that, as I remember it, I 
seem to be looking at myself from outside. I see 
myself a very tiny child in a long, blue pinafore, look- 
ing into the breeding-box of some Barbary ring-doves 
that my grandmother kept in the window of the huge 
studio in Fitzroy Square. The window itself appears 
to me to be as high as a house, and I myself to be as 
small as a doorstep, so that I stand on tiptoe and just 
manage to get my eyes and nose over the edge of the 
box, while my long curls fall forward and tickle my 
nose. And then I perceive grayish and almost shape- 
less objects with, upon them, little speckles like the 
very short spines of hedgehogs, and I stand with the 
first surprise of my life and with the first wonder of 
my life. I ask myself, can these be doves — these 
unrecognizable, panting morsels of flesh ? And then, 

X 



DEDICATION 



very soon, my grandmother comes in and is angry. 
She tells me that if the mother dove is disturbed she 
will eat her young. This, I believe, is quite incor- 
rect. Nevertheless, I know quite well that for many 
days afterward I thought I had destroyed life, and 
that I was exceedingly sinful. I never knew my 
grandmother to be angry again, except once, when 
she thought I had broken a comb which I had cer- 
tainly not broken. I never knew her raise her voice; 
I hardly know how she can have expressed anger; 
she was by so far the most equable and gentle person 
I have ever known that she seemed to me to be almost 
not a personality but just a natural thing. Yet it was 
my misfortune to have from this gentle personality my 
first conviction — and this, my first conscious convic- 
tion, was one of great sin, of a deep criminality. 
Similarly with my father, who was a man of great 
rectitude and with strong ideas of discipline. Yet for 
a man of his date he must have been quite mild in his 
treatment of his children. In his bringing up, such 
was the attitude of parents toward children that it 
was the duty of himself and his brothers and sisters at 
the end of each meal to kneel down and kiss the hands 
of their father and mother as a token of thanks for the 
nourishment received. So that he was, after his 
lights, a mild and reasonable man to his children. 
Nevertheless, what I remember of him most was that 
he called me *the patient but extremely stupid donkey.' 
And so I went through life until only just the other 

xi 



DEDICATION 



day with the conviction of extreme, sinfulness and of 
extreme stupidity. 

"God knows that the lesson we learn from life is 
that our very existence in the nature of things is 
a perpetual harming of somebody — if only because 
every mouthful of food that we eat is a mouthful 
taken from somebody else. This lesson you will 
have to learn in time. But if I write this book, 
and if I give it to the world, it is very much that 
you may be spared a great many of the quite un- 
necessary tortures that were mine until I 'grew up.' 
Knowing you as I do, I imagine that you very much 
resemble myself in temperament, and so you may 
resemble myself in moral tortures. And since I can- 
not flatter myself that either you or I are very ex- 
ceptional, it is possible that this book may be useful 
not only to you for whom I have written it, but to 
many other children in a world that is sometimes un- 
necessarily sad. It sums up the impressions that I 
have received in a quarter of a century. For the rea- 
son that I have given you — for the reason that I have 
now discovered myself to have 'grown up' — it seems 
to me that it marks the end of an epoch, the closing of 
a door. 

"As I have said, I find that my impressions of the 
early and rather noteworthy persons among whom my 
childhood was passed — that these impressions are be- 
ginning to grow a little dim. So I have tried to rescue 
them now, before they go out of my mind altogether. 

xii 



DEDICATION 



And, while trying to rescue them, I have tried to com- 
pare them with my impressions of the world as it is at 
the present day. As you will see when you get to the 
last chapter of the book, I am perfectly contented 
with the world of to-day. It is not the world of 
twenty-five years ago, but it is a very good world. It 
is not so full of the lights of individualities, but it is not 
so full of shadow for the obscure. For you must re- 
member that I always considered myself to be the most 
obscure of obscure persons — a very small, a very sinful, 
a very stupid child. And for such persons the world of 
twenty-five years ago was rather a dismal place. You 
see there were in those days a number of those terrible 
and forbidding things — the Victorian great figures. 
To me life was simply not worth living because of the 
existence of Carlyle, of Mr. Ruskin, of Mr. Holman 
Hunt, of Mr. Browning, or of the gentleman who 
built the Crystal Palace. These people were perpetu- 
ally held up to me as standing upon unattainable 
heights, and at the same time I was perpetually being 
told that if I could not attain these heights I might 
just as well not cumber the earth. What then was 
left for me .? Nothing. Simply nothing. 

"Now, my dear children — and I speak not only to 
you, but to all who have never grown up — never let 
yourselves be disheartened or saddened by such 
thoughts. Do not, that is to say, desire to be Ruskins 
or Carlyles. Do not desire to be great figures. It 
will crush in you all ambition; it will render you timid, 

xiii 



DEDICATION 



day with the conviction of extreme ^sinfulness and of 
extreme stupidity. 

"God knows that the lesson we learn from life is 
that our very existence in the nature of things is 
a perpetual harming of somebody — if only because 
every mouthful of food that we eat is a mouthful 
taken from somebody else. This lesson you will 
have to learn in time. But if I write this book, 
and if I give it to the world, it is very much that 
you may be spared a great many of the quite un- 
necessary tortures that were mine until I 'grew up/ 
Knowing you as I do, I imagine that you very much 
resemble myself in temperament, and so you may 
resemble myself in moral tortures. And since I can- 
not flatter myself that either you or I are very ex- 
ceptional, it is possible that this book may be useful 
not only to you for whom I have written it, but to 
many other children in a world that is sometimes un- 
necessarily sad. It sums up the impressions that I 
have received in a quarter of a century. For the rea- 
son that I have given you — for the reason that I have 
now discovered myself to have 'grown up' — it seems 
to me that it marks the end of an epoch, the closing of 
a door. 

"As I have said, I find that my impressions of the 
early and rather noteworthy persons among whom my 
childhood was passed — that these impressions are be- 
ginning to grow a little dim. So I have tried to rescue 
them now, before they go out of my mind altogether. 

xii 



DEDICATION 



And, while trying to rescue them, I have tried to com- 
pare them with my impressions of the world as it is at 
the present day. As you will see when you get to the 
last chapter of the book, I am perfectly contented 
with the world of to-day. It is not the world of 
twenty-five years ago, but it is a very good world. It 
is not so full of the lights of individualities, but it is not 
so full of shadow for the obscure. For you must re- 
member that I always considered myself to be the most 
obscure of obscure persons — a very small, a very sinful, 
a very stupid child. And for such persons the world of 
twenty-five years ago was rather a dismal place. You 
see there were in those days a number of those terrible 
and forbidding things — the Victorian great figures. 
To me life was simply not worth living because of the 
existence of Carlyle, of Mr. Ruskin, of Mr. Holman 
Hunt, of Mr. Browning, or of the gentleman who 
built the Crystal Palace. These people were perpetu- 
ally held up to me as standing upon unattainable 
heights, and at the same time I was perpetually being 
told that if I could not attain these heights I might 
just as well not cumber the earth. What then was 
left for me .? Nothing. Simply nothing. 

"Now, my dear children — and I speak not only to 
you, but to all who have never grown up — never let 
yourselves be disheartened or saddened by such 
thoughts. Do not, that is to say, desire to be Ruskins 
or Carlyles. Do not desire to be great figures. It 
will crush in you all ambition; it will render you timid, 

xiii 



DEDICATION 



it will foil nearly all your efforts. Nowadays we have 
no great figures, and I thank Heaven for it, because you 
and I can breathe freely. With the passing the other 
day of Tolstoy, with the death just a few weeks before 
of Mr. Holman Hunt, they all went away to Olympus, 
where very fittingly they may dwell. And so you are 
freed from these burdens which so heavily and for so 
long hung upon the shoulders of one — and of how many 
others .? For the heart of another is a dark forest, and 
I do not know how many thousands other of my 
fellow men and women have been so oppressed. Per- 
haps I was exceptionally morbid, perhaps my ideals 
were exceptionally high. For high ideals were always 
being held before me. My grandfather, as you will 
read, was not only perpetually giving; he was per- 
petually enjoining upon all others the necessity of 
giving never-endingly. We were to give not only all 
our goods, but all our thoughts, all our endeavors; we 
were to stand aside always to give openings for others. 
I do not know that I would ask you to look upon life 
otherwise or to adopt another standard of conduct; 
but still it is as well to know beforehand that such a 
rule of life will expose you to innumerable miseries, 
to efforts almost superhuman, and to innumerable be- 
trayals — or to transactions in which you will consider 
yourself to have been betrayed. I do not know that 
I would wish you to be spared any of these unhappi- 
nesses. For the past generosities of one's life are the 
only milestones on that road that one can regret leav- 

xiv 



DEDICATION 



ing behind. Nothing else matters very much, since 
they alone are one's achievement. And remember 
this, that when you are in any doubt, standing between 
what may appear right and what may appear wrong, 
though you cannot tell which is wrong and which is 
right, and may well dread the issue — act then upon the 
lines of your generous emotions, even though your 
generous emotions may at the time appear likely to 
lead you to disaster. So you may have a life full of 
regrets, which are fitting things for a man to have be- 
hind him, but so you will have with you no causes for 
remorse. So at least lived your ancestors and their 
friends, and, as I knew them, as they impressed them- 
selves upon me, I do not think that one needed, or that 
one needs to-day, better men. They had their passions, 
their extravagances, their imprudences, their follies. 
They were sometimes unjust, violent, unthinking. 
But they were never cold, they were never mean. 
They went to shipwreck with high spirits. I could 
ask nothing better for you if I were inclined to trouble 
Providence with petitions. 

"F. M. H. 

"P. S. — Just a word to make plain the actual na- 
ture of this book: It consists of impressions. When 
some parts of it appeared in serial form, a distinguished 
critic fell foul of one of the stories that I told. My 
impression was and remains that I heard Thomas 
Carlyle tell how at Weimar he borrowed an apron 

XV 



DEDICATION 



from a waiter and served tea to Goethe and Schiller, 
who were sitting in eighteenth-century court dress be- 
neath a tree. The distinguished critic of a distin- 
guished paper commented upon this story, saying that 
Carlyle never was in Weimar, and that Schiller died 
when Carlyle was aged five. I did not write to this 
distinguished critic, because I do not like writing to the 
papers, but I did write to a third party. I said that a 
few days before that date I had been talking to a Hes- 
sian peasant, a veteran of the war of 1870. He had 
fought at Sedan, at Gravelotte, before Paris, and had 
been one of the troops that marched under the Arc de 
Triomphe. In 1910 I asked this veteran of 1870 what 
the war had been all about. He said that the Em- 
peror of Germany, having heard that the Emperor 
Napoleon had invaded England and taken his mother- 
in-law. Queen Victoria, prisoner— that the Emperor of 
Germany had marched into France to rescue his dis- 
tinguished connection. In my letter to my critic's 
friend I said that if I had related this anecdote I should 
not have considered it as a contribution to history, but 
as material illustrating the state of mind of a Hessian 
peasant. So with my anecdote about Carlyle. It was 
intended to show the state of mind of a child of seven 
brought into contact with a Victorian great figure. 
When I wrote the anecdote I was perfectly aware that 
Carlyle never was in Weimar while Schiller was alive, 
or that Schiller and Goethe would not be likely to 
drink tea, and that they would not have worn eigh- 

xvi 



DEDICATION 



teenth-century court dress at any time when Carlyle 
was alive. But as a boy I had that pretty and roman- 
tic impression, and so I presented it to the world — 
for what it was worth. So much I communicated to 
the distinguished critic in question. He was kind 
enough to reply to my friend, the third party, that, 
whatever I might say, he was right and I was wrong. 
Carlyle was only five when Schiller died, and so on. 
He proceeded to comment upon my anecdote of the 
Hessian peasant to this effect: At the time of the 
Franco-Prussian War there was no emperor of Ger- 
many; the Emperor Napoleon never invaded England; 
he never took Victoria prisoner, and so on. He 
omitted to mention that there never was and never will 
be a modern emperor of Germany. 

"I suppose that this gentleman was doing what is 
called * pulling my leg,' for it is impossible to imagine 
that any one, even an English literary critic or a Ger- 
man professor or a mixture of the two, could be so 
wanting in a sense of humor — or in any sense at all. 
But there the matter is, and this book is a book of im- 
pressions. My impression is that there have been six 
thousand four hundred and seventy-two books written 
to give the facts about the Pre-Raphaelite movement. 
My impression is that I myself have written more than 
seventeen million wearisome and dull words as to the 
facts about the Pre-Raphaelite movement. These, 
you understand, are my impressions; probably there 
are not more than ninety books dealing with the sub- 

xvii 



DEDICATION 



ject, and I have not myself really written more than 
three hundred and sixty thousand words on these 
matters. But what I am trying to get at is that, though 
there have been many things written about these facts, 
no one has whole-heartedly and thoroughly attempted 
to get the atmosphere of these twenty-five years. 
This book, in short, is full of inaccuracies as to facts, 
but its accuracy as to impressions is absolute. For 
the facts, when you have a little time to waste, I should 
suggest that you go through this book, carefully noting 
the errors. To the one of you who succeeds in finding 
the largest number I will cheerfully present a copy of 
the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, so 
that you may still further perfect yourself in the hunt- 
ing out of errors. But if one of you can discover in it 
any single impression that can be demonstrably proved 
not sincere on my part I will draw you a check for 
whatever happens to be my balance at the bank for the 
next ten succeeding years. This is a handsome offer, 
but I can afford to make it, for you will not gain a single 
penny in the transaction. My business in life, in 
short, is to attempt to discover and to try to let you 
see where we stand. I don't really deal in facts; I 
have for facts a most profound contempt. I try to 
give you what I see to be the spirit of an age, of a town, 
of a movement. This cannot be done with facts. 
Supposing that I am walking beside a cornfield and 
I hear a great rustling, and a hare jumps out. Sup- 
posing now that I am the owner of that field and I go 

xviii 



DEDICATION 



to my farm bailiff and should say: 'There are about a 
million hares in that field. I wish you would keep the 
damned beasts down.' There would not have been a 
million hares in the field, and hares being soulless 
beasts cannot be damned, but I should have produced 
upon that bailiff the impression that I desired. So in 
this book. It is not always foggy in Bloomsbury; 
indeed, I happen to be writing in Bloomsbury at this 
moment and, though it is just before Christmas, the 
light of day is quite tolerable. Nevertheless, with an 
effrontery that will, I am sure, appal the critic of my 
Hessian peasant story, I say that the Pre-Raphaelite 
poets carried on their work amid the glooms of 
Bloomsbury, and this I think is a true impression. 
To say that on an average in the last twenty-five years 
there have been in Bloomsbury per three hundred and 
sixty-five days, ten of bright sunshine, two hundred 
and ninety-nine of rain, forty-two of fog, and the re- 
mainder compounded of all three, would not seriously 
help the impression. This fact I think you will un- 
derstand, though I doubt whether my friend the critic 
will. F. M. H. 

*'P. P. S. — I find that I have written these words 
not in Bloomsbury, but in the electoral district of 
East St. Pancras. Perhaps it is gloomier in Blooms- 
bury. I will go and see. 



T.P.P. S.— Iti 



IS. 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 



THE INNER CIRCLE 

SAYS Thackeray: 
"On his way to the city, Mr. Newcome rode 
to look at the new house, No. 120 Fitzroy Square, 
which his brother, the Colonel, had taken in conjunc- 
tion with that Indian friend of his, Mr. Binnie. . . . 
The house is vast but, it must be owned, melancholy. 
Not long since it was a ladies' school, in an unpros- 
perous condition. The scar left by Madame Latour's 
brass plate may still be seen on the tall black door, 
cheerfully ornamented, in the style of the end of the 
last century, with a funereal urn in the centre of the 
entry, and garlands and the skulls of rams at each 
corner. . . . The kitchens were gloomy. The stables 
were gloomy. Great black passages; cracked con- 
servatory; dilapidated bath-room, with melancholy 
waters moaning and fizzing from the cistern; the great 
large blank stone staircase — were all so many melan- 
choly features in the general countenance of the house; 

I 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

but the Colonel thought it perfectly cheerful and 
pleasant, and furnished it in his rough-and-ready 
way." — The Newcomes. 

And it was in this house of Colonel Newcome's that 
my eyes first opened, if not to the light of day, at least 
to any visual impression that has not since been 
effaced. I can remember vividly, as a very small boy, 
shuddering, as I stood upon the doorstep, at the 
thought that the great stone urn, lichened, soot- 
stained, and decorated with a great ram's head by 
way of handle, elevated only by what looked like a 
square piece of stone of about the size and shape of a 
folio-book, might fall upon me and crush me entirely 
out of existence. Such a possible happening, I re- 
member, was a frequent subject of discussion among 
Madox Brown's friends. 

Ford Madox Brown, the painter of the pictures 
called "Work" and "The Last of England," and the 
first painter in England, if not in the world, to attempt 
to render light exactly as it appeared to him, was at 
that time at the height of his powers, of his reputation, 
and of such prosperity as he enjoyed. His income from 
his pictures was considerable, and since he was an ex- 
cellent talker, an admirable host, extraordinarily and, 
indeed, unreasonably open-handed, the great, formal, 
and rather gloomy house had become a meeting-place 
for almost all the intellectually unconventional of that 
time. Between 1870 and 1880 the real Pre-Raphaelite 
movement was long since at an end; the ^Esthetic 

2 



THE INNER CIRCLE 



movement, which also was nicknamed Pre-Raphaehte, 
was, however, coming into prominence, and at the very 
heart of this movement was Madox Brown. As I re- 
member him, with a square white beard, with a ruddy 
complexion, and with thick white hair parted in the 
middle and falling to above the tops of his ears, Madox 
Brown exactly resembled the king of hearts in a pack 
of cards. In passion and in emotions — more par- 
ticularly during one of his fits of gout — he was a hard- 
swearing, old-fashioned Tory; his reasoning, however, 
and circumstances made him a revolutionary of the 
romantic type. I am not sure, even, that toward his 
later years he would not have called himself an anar- 
chist, and have damned your eyes if you had faintly 
doubted this obviously extravagant assertion. But he 
loved the picturesque, as nearly all his friends loved it. 
About the inner circle of those who fathered and 
sponsored the Esthetic movement there was abso- 
lutely nothing of the languishing. They were to a 
man rather burly, passionate creatures, extraordi- 
narily enthusiastic, extraordinarily romantic, and most 
impressively quarrelsome. Neither about Rossetti nor 
about Burne- Jones, neither about William Morris nor 
P. P. Marshall — and these were the principal upholders 
of the firm of Morris & Company, which gave aestheti- 
cism to the western world — was there any inclination 
to live upon the smell of the lily. It was the outer ring, 
the disciples, who developed this laudable ambition 
for poetic pallor, for clinging garments, and for ascetic 

3 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 



countenances. And it was, I believe, Mr. Oscar Wilde 
who first formulated this poetically vegetarian theory 
of life in Madox Brown's studio at Fitzroy Square. 
No, there was little of the smell of the lily about the 
leaders of this movement. Thus it was one of Madox 
Brown's most pleasing anecdotes — at any rate, it was 
one that he related with the utmost gusto — how 
William Morris came out onto the landing in the house 
of the **Firm" in Red Lion Square and roared down- 
stairs: 

"Mary, those six eggs were bad. I've eaten them, 
but don't let it occur again." 

Morris, also, was in the habit of lunching daily off 
roast beef and plum pudding, no matter at what season 
of the year, and he liked his puddings large. So that, 
similarly, upon the landing one day he shouted: 
"Mary, do you call that a pudding ?" 
He was holding upon the end of a fork a plum 
pudding about the size of an ordinary breakfast cup, 
and having added some appropriate objurgations, he 
hurled the edible down-stairs onto Red-Lion Mary's 
forehead. This anecdote should not be taken to 
evidence settled brutality on the part of the poet- 
craftsman. Red-Lion Mary was one of the loyalest 
supporters of the " Firm " to the end of her days. No, 
it was just in the full-blooded note of the circle. They 
liked to swear, and, what is more, they liked to hear 
each other swear. Thus another of Madox Brown's 
anecdotes went to show how he kept Morris sitting 

4 




FORD MADOX BROWN 



THE INNER CIRCLE 



monumentally still, under the pretence that he was 
drawing his portrait, while Mr. Arthur Hughes tied 
his long hair into knots for the purpose of enjoying the 
explosion that was sure to come when the released 
Topsy — Morris was always Topsy to his friends — ran 
his hands through his hair. This anecdote always 
seemed to me to make considerable calls upon one's 
faith. Nevertheless, it was one that Madox Brown 
used most frequently to relate, so that no doubt some- 
thing of the sort must have occurred. 

No, the note of these aesthetes was in no sense as- 
cetic. What they wanted in life was room to expand 
and to be at ease. Thus I remember, in a sort of 
golden vision, Rossetti lying upon a sofa in the back 
studio with lighted candles at his feet and lighted 
candles at his head, while two extremely beautiful 
ladies dropped grapes into his mouth. But Rossetti 
did this not because he desired to present the beholder 
with a beautiful vision, but because he liked lying on 
sofas, he liked grapes, and he particularly liked beau- 
tiful ladies. They desired, in fact, all of them, room 
to expand. And when they could not expand in any 
other directions they expanded enormously into their 
letters. And — I don't know why — they mostly ad- 
dressed their letters abusing each other to Madox 
Brown. There would come one short, sharp note, 
and then answers occupying reams of note-paper. 
Thus one great painter would write: 

"Dear Brown — Tell Gabriel that if he takes my 

5 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

model Fanny up the river on Sunday I will never 
speak to him again." 

Gabriel would take the model Fanny up the river 
on Sunday, and a triangular duel of portentous letters 
would ensue. 

Or again, Swinburne would write: 

''Dear Brown — If P. says that I said that Gabriel 
was in the habit of , P. lies." 

The accusation against Rossetti being a Gargan- 
tuan impossibility which Swinburne, surely the most 
loyal of friends, could impossibly have made, there 
ensued a Gargantuan correspondence. Brown writes 
to P. how, when, and why the accusation was made; 
he explains how he went round to Jones, who had 
nothing to do with the matter, and found that Jones 
had eaten practically nothing for the last fortnight, and 
how between them they had decided that the best 
thing that they could do would be to go and tell 
Rossetti all about it, and of how Rossetti had had a 
painful interview with Swinburne, and how unhappy 
everybody was. P. replies to Brown that he had 
never uttered any such words upon any such occasion; 
that upon that occasion he was not present, having 
gone round to Ruskin, who had the toothache, and 
who read him the first hundred and twenty pages of 
Stones of Venice ; that he could not possibly have 
said anything of the sort about Gabriel, since he knew 
nothing whatever of Gabriel's daily habits, having re- 
fused to speak to him for the last nine months because 

6 



THE INNER CIRCLE 



of Gabriel's intolerable habit of backbiting, which he 
was sure would lead them all to destruction, and so 
deemed it prudent not to go near him. Gabriel him- 
self then enters the fray, saying that he has discovered 
that it is not P. at all who made the accusation, but 
Q., and that the accusation was made not against him, 
but about O. X., the Academician, If, however, he, 
P., accuses him, Gabriel, of backbiting, P. must be 
perfectly aware that this is not the case, he, Gabriel, 
having only said a few words against P.'s wife's mother, 
who is a damned old cat. And so the correspondence 
continues, Jones and Swinburne and Marshall and 
William Rossetti and Charles Augustus Howell and a 
great many more joining in the fray, until at last every- 
body withdraws all the charges, six months having 
passed, and Brown invites all the contestants to dinner, 
Gabriel intending to bring old Plint, the picture- 
buyer, and to make him, when he has had plenty of 
wine, buy P.'s picture of the "Lost Shepherd" for two 
thousand pounds. 

These tremendous quarrels, in fact, were all storms 
in tea-cups, and although the break-up of the **Firm" 
did cause a comparatively lasting estrangement be- 
tween several of the partners, it has always pleased me 
to remember that at the last private view that Madox 
Brown held of one of his pictures every one of the 
surviving Pre-Raphaelite brothers came to his studio, 
and every one of the surviving partners of the original 
firm of Morris & Company. 

7 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

The arrival of Sir Edward Burne- Jones and his 
wife brought up a characteristic passion of Madox 
Brown's. Sir Edward had persuaded the president 
of the Royal Academy to accompany them in their 
visit. They were actuated by the kindly desire to give 
Madox Brown the idea that thus at the end of his life 
the Royal Academy wished to extend some sort of 
official recognition to a painter who had persistently 
refused for nearly half a century to recognize their 
existence. Unfortunately it was an autumn day and 
the twilight had set in very early. Thus not only were 
the distinguished visitors rather shadowy in the dusk, 
but the enormous picture itself was entirely indis- 
tinguishable. Lady Burne- Jones, with her peculiarly 
persuasive charm, whispered to me, unheard by Madox 
Brown, that I should light the studio gas, and I was 
striking a match when I was appalled to hear Madox 
Brown shout, in tones of extreme violence and of ap- 
parent alarm: 

"Damn and blast it all, Fordie! Do you want us all 
blown into the next world .?" 

And he proceeded to explain to Eady Burne- Jones 
that there was an escape of gas from a pipe. When 
she suggested candles or a paraffin lamp, Madox 
Brown declared with equal violence that he couldn't 
think how she could imagine that he could have such 
infernally dangerous things in the house. The inter- 
view thus concluded in a gloom of the most tenebrous, 
and shortly afterward he went down-stairs, where, in 



THE INNER CIRCLE 



the golden glow of a great many candles set against a 
golden and embossed wall-paper, tea was being served. 
The fact was that Madox Brown was determined that 
no "damned academician" should see his picture. 
Nevertheless, it is satisfactory to me to think that 
there w^as among these distinguished and kindly men 
still so great a feeling of solidarity. They had come, 
many of them, from great distances, to do honor, or 
at least to be kind, to an old painter who at that time 
was more entirely forgotten than he has ever been 
before or since. 

The lily tradition of the disciples of these men is, I 
should imagine, almost entirely extinguished. But 
the other day, at a particularly smart wedding, there 
turned up one stanch survivor in garments of prismatic 
hues — a mustard-colored ulster, a green wide-awake, 
a blue shirt, a purple tie, and a suit of tweed. This 
gentleman moved distractedly among groups of cor- 
rectly attired people. In one hand he bore an ex- 
tremely minute painting by himself. It was, perhaps, 
of the size of a visiting-card, set in an ocean of white 
mount. In the other he bore an enormous spray of 
Madonna lilies. That, I presume, was why he had 
failed to remove his green hat. He was approached by 
the hostess and he told her that he wished to place the 
picture, his wedding gift, in the most appropriate posi- 
tion that could be found for it. And upon her sug- 
gesting that she would attend to the hanging after the 
ceremony was over, he brushed her aside. Finally he 

9 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 



placed the picture upon the ground beneath a tall 
window, and perched the spray of hlies on top of the 
frame. He then stood back and, waving his ema- 
ciated hands and stroking his brown beard, surveyed 
the effect of his decoration. The painting, he said, 
symbolized the consolation that the arts would afford 
the young couple during their married life, and the 
lily stood for the purity of the bride. This is how in 
the seventies and the eighties the outer ring of the 
aesthetes really behaved. It was as much in their note 
as were the plum pudding and the roast beef in Will- 
iam Morris's. The reason for this is not very far to 
seek. The older men, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the 
members of the "Firm" had too rough work to do to 
bother much about the trimmings. 

It is a little difficult nowadays to imagine the 
acridity with which any new artistic movement was 
opposed when Victoria was Queen of England. 
Charles Dickens, as I have elsewhere pointed out, 
called loudly for the immediate imprisonment of 
Millais and the other Pre-Raphaelites, including my 
grandfather, who was not a Pre-Raphaelite. Blas- 
phemy was the charge alleged against them, just as it 
was the charge alleged against the earliest upholders 
of Wagner's music in England, This may seem in- 
credible, but I have in my possession three letters from 
three different members of the public addressed to my 
father, Dr. Francis Hueffer, a man of great erudition 
and force of character, who, from the early seventies 

10 



THE INNER CIRCLE 



until his death, was the musical critic of the Times. 
The writers stated that unless Doctor Hueffer ab- 
stained from upholding the blasphemous music of the 
future — and in each case the writer used the word 
blasphemous — he would be respectively stabbed, 
ducked in a horse-pond, and beaten to death by hired 
roughs. Yet to-day I never go to a place of popular 
entertainment where miscellaneous music is per- 
formed for the benefit of the poorest classes without 
hearing at least the overture to "Tannhauser/* 
Nowadays it is difficult to discern any new movement 
in any of the arts. No doubt there is movement, no 
doubt we who write and our friends who paint and 
compose are producing the arts of the future. But 
we never have the luck to have the word ** blasphe- 
mous" hurled at us. It would, indeed, be almost in- 
conceivable that such a thing could happen, that the 
frame of mind should be reconstructed. But to the 
Pre-Raphaelites this word was blessed in the extreme. 
For human nature is such — perhaps on account of 
obstinacy or perhaps on account of feelings of justice 
— that to persecute an art, as to persecute a religion, is 
simply to render its practitioners the more stubborn 
and its advocates in their fewness the more united, 
and the more effective in their union. It was the in- 
justice of the attack upon the Pre-Raphaelites, it was 
the fury and outcry, that won for them the attention 
of Mr. Ruskin. And Mr. Ruskin's attention being 
aroused, he entered on that splendid and efficient 

2 II 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

championing of their cause which at last established 
them in a position of perhaps more immediate im- 
portance than, as painters, they exactly merited. As 
pioneers and as sufferers they can never sufficiently 
be recommended. Mr. Ruskin, for some cause which 
my grandfather was used to declare was purely per- 
sonal, was the only man intimately connected with 
these movements who had no connection at all with 
Madox Brown. I do not know why this was, but 
it is a fact that, although Madox Brown's pictures 
were in considerable evidence at all places where 
the pictures of the Pre-Raphaelites were exhibited, 
Mr. Ruskin in all his works never once mentioned 
his name. He never blamed him; he never praised 
him; he ignored him. And this was at a time when 
Ruskin must have known that a word from him was 
sufficient to make the fortune of any painter. It 
was sufficient not so much because of Mr. Ruskin's 
weight with the general public as because the small 
circle of buyers, wealthy and assiduous, who sur- 
rounded the painters of the moment, hung upon Mr. 
Ruskin's lips and needed at least his printed sanction 
for all their purchases. 

Madox Brown was the most benevolent of men, the 
most helpful and the kindest. His manifestations, 
however, were apt at times to be a little thorny. 
I remember an anecdote which Madox Brown's 
housemaid of that day was in the habit of re- 
lating to me when she used to put me to bed. 

12 



THE INNER CIRCLE 



Said she — and the exact words remain upon my 
mind: 

"I was down in the kitchen waiting to carry up the 
meat, when a cabman comes down the area steps and 
says: 'I've got your master in my cab. He's very 
drunk/ I says to him" — and an immense intonation 
of pride would come into Charlotte's voice — 'My 
master's a-sitting at the head of his table entertaining 

his guests. That's Mr. . Carry him up-stairs 

and lay him in the bath.'" 

Madox Brown, whose laudable desire it was at many 
stages of his career to redeem poets and others from 
dipsomania, was in the habit of providing several of 
them with labels upon which were inscribed his own 
name and address. Thus, when any of these geniuses 
were found incapable in the neighborhood they would 
be brought by cabmen or others to Fitzroy Square. 
This, I think, was a stratagem more characteristic of 
Madox Brown's singular and quaint ingenuity than 
any that I can recall. The poet being thus recaptured 
would be carried up-stairs by Charlotte and the cab- 
man and laid in the bath — in Colonel Newcome's very 
bath-room, where, according to Thackeray, the water 
moaned and gurgled so mournfully in the cistern. 
For me, I can only remember that room as an apart- 
ment of warmth and lightness; it was a concomitant to 
all the pleasures that sleeping at my grandfather's 
meant for me. And indeed, to Madox Brown as to 
Colonel Newcome — they were very similar natures in 

13 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

their chivalrous, unbusinesslike, and na'ive simpHcity 
— the house in Fitzroy Square seemed perfectly pleas- 
ant and cheerful. 

The poet having been put into the bath would be 
reduced to sobriety by cups of the strongest coffee that 
could be made (the bath was selected because he would 
not be able to roll out and to injure himself). And 
having been thus reduced to sobriety, he would be lec- 
tured, and he would be kept in the house, being given 
nothing stronger than lemonade to drink, until he 
found the regime intolerable. Then he would dis- 
appear, the label sewn inside his coat collar, to re- 
appear once more in the charge of a cabman. 

Of Madox Brown's acerbity I witnessed myself no 
instances at all, unless it be the one that I have lately 
narrated. A possibly too-stern father of the old school, 
he was as a grandfather extravagantly indulgent. I 
remember his once going through the catalogue of his 
grandchildren and deciding, after careful delibera- 
tion, that they were all geniuses with the exception of 
one, as to whom he could not be certain whether he 
was a genius or mad. Thus I read with astonish- 
ment the words of a critic of distinction with re- 
gard to the exhibition of Madox Brown's works that I 
organized at the Grafton Gallery ten years ago. They 
were to the effect that Madox Brown's pictures were 
very crabbed and ugly — but what was to be expected 
of a man whose disposition was so harsh and distorted .? 
This seemed to me to be an amazing statement. But 

H 



THE INNER CIRCLE 



upon discovering the critic's name I found that Madox 
Brown once kicked him down-stairs. The gentleman 
in question had come to Madox Brown with the pro- 
posal from an eminent firm of picture dealers that the 
painter should sell all his works to them for a given 
number of years at a very low price. In return they 
were to do what would be called nowadays ''booming" 
him, and they would do their best to get him elected 
an associate of the Royal Academy. That Madox 
Brown should have received with such violence a prop- 
osition that seemed to the critic so eminently advanta- 
geous for all parties, justified that gentleman in his 
own mind in declaring that Madox Brown had a dis- 
torted temperament. Perhaps he had. 

But if he had a rough husk he had a sweet kernel, 
and for this reason the gloomy house in Fitzroy Square 
did not, I think, remain as a shape of gloom in the 
minds of many people. It was very tall, very large, 
very gray, and in front of it towered up very high the 
mournful plane-trees of the square. And over the 
porch was the funereal urn with the ram's head. 
This object, dangerous and threatening, has always 
seemed to me to be symbolical of this circle of men, 
so practical in their work and so romantically un- 
practical, as a whole, in their lives. They knew 
exactly how, according to their lights, to paint pict- 
ures, to write poems, to make tables, to decorate pianos, 
rooms, or churches. But as to the conduct of life they 
were a little sketchy, a little romantic, perhaps a little 

15 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

careless. I should say that of them all Madox Brown 
was the most practical. But his way of being prac- 
tical was always to be quaintly ingenious. Thus we 
had the urn. Most of the Pre-Raphaelites dreaded it; 
they all of them talked about it as a possible danger, 
but never was any step taken for its removal. It was 
never even really settled in their minds whose would 
be the responsibility for any accident. It is difficult 
to imagine the frame of mind, but there it was, and 
there to this day the urn remains. The question could 
have been settled by any lawyer, or Madox Brown 
might have had some clause that provided for his in- 
demnity inserted in his lease. And, just as the urn 
itself set the tone of the old immense Georgian man- 
sion fallen from glory, so perhaps the fact that it re- 
mained for so long the topic of conversation set the 
note of the painters, the painter-poets, the poet- 
craftsmen, the painter-musicians, the filibuster verse- 
writers, and all that singular collection of men versed 
in the arts. They assembled and revelled compara- 
tively modestly in the rooms where Colonel Newcome 
and his fellow-directors of the Bundelcund Board had 
partaken of mulligatawny and spiced punch before 
the sideboard that displayed its knife-boxes with the 
green-handled knives in their serried phalanxes. 

But, for the matter of that, Madox Brown's own side- 
board also displayed its green-handled knives, which al- 
ways seemed to me to place him as the man of the old 
school in which he was born and remained to the end 

i6 



THE INNER CIRCLE 



of his days. If he was impracticable, he hadn't about 
him a touch of the Bohemian; if he was romantic, his 
romances took place along ordered lines. Every 
friend's son of his who went into the navy was des- 
tined in his eyes to become, not a pirate, but at least 
a port-admiral. Every young lawyer that he knew 
was certain, even if he were only a solicitor, to become 
Lord Chancellor, and every young poet who presented 
him with a copy of his first work was destined for the 
Laureateship. And he really believed in these ro- 
mantic prognostications, which came from him with- 
out end as without selection. So that if he was the 
first to give a helping hand to D. G. Rossetti, his 
patronage in one or two other instances was not so 
wisely bestowed. 

He was, of course, the sworn foe of the Royal 
Academy. For him they were always, the members 
of that august body, "those dajnned academicians," 
with a particular note of acerbity upon the expletive. 
Yet I very well remember, upon the appearance of the 
first numbers of the Daily Graphic, that Madox 
Brown, being exceedingly struck by the line engrav- 
ings of one of the artists that paper regularly employed 
to render social functions, exclaimed : 

"By Jove! if young Cleaver goes on as well as he 
has begun, those damned academicians, supposing 
they had any sense, would elect him president right 
away!" Thus it will be seen that the business of 
romance was not to sweep away the Royal Academy, 

17 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

was not to found an opposing salon, but it was to 
capture the established body by storm, leaping, as it 
were, on to the very quarter-deck, and setting to the 
old ship a new course. The characteristic, in fact, of 
all these men was their warm-heartedness, their en- 
mity for the formal, for the frigid, for the ungenerous. 
It cannot be said that any of them despised money. I 
doubt whether it would even be said that any of them 
did not, at one time or another, seek for popularity, 
or try to paint, write, or decorate pot-boilers. But they 
were naively unable to do it. To the timid — and the 
public is always the timid — what was individual in 
their characters was always alarming. It was alarm- 
ing even when they tried to paint the conventional 
dog-and-girl pictures of the Christmas supplement. 
The dogs were too like dogs and did not simper; the 
little girls were too like little girls. They would be 
probably rendered as just losing their first teeth. 

In spite of the Italianism of Rossetti, who was never 
in Italy, and the mediaevalism of Morris, who had 
never looked mediaevalism, with its cruelties, its filth, 
its stenches, and its avarice, in the face — in spite of 
these tendencies that were forced upon them by those 
two contagious spirits, the whole note of this old, 
romantic circle was national, was astonishingly Eng- 
lish, was Georgian even. They seemed to date from 
the Regency, and to have skipped altogether the bane- 
ful influences of early Victorianism and of the com- 
merciality that the Prince Consort spread through 



THE INNER CIRCLE 



England, They seem to me to resemble in their lives 
— and perhaps in their lives they w^ere greater than 
their v^orks — to resemble nothing so much as a group 
of old-fashioned ships' captains. Madox Brown, in- 
deed, was nominated for a midshipman in the year 
1827. f^^^ father had fought on the famous Arethusa 
in the classic fight with the Belle Poule. And but for 
the fact that his father quarrelled with Commodore 
Coffin, and so lost all hope of influence at the Ad- 
miralty, it is probable that Madox Brown would never 
have painted a picture or have lived in Colonel New- 
come's house. Indeed, on the last occasion when I saw 
William Morris I happened to meet him in Portland 
Place. He was going to the house of a peer, that his 
firm was engaged in decorating, and he took me with 
him to look at the work. He was then a comparatively 
old man, and his work had grown very flamboyant, so 
that the decoration of the dining-room consisted, as far 
as I can remember, of one huge acanthus-leaf design. 
Morris looked at this absent-mindedly, and said that 
he had just been talking to some members of a ship's 
crew whom he had met in Fenchurch Street. They 
had remained for some time under the impression 
that he was a ship's captain. This had pleased him 
very much, for it was his ambition to be taken for such 
a man. I have heard, indeed, that this happened to 
him on several occasions, on each of which he ex- 
pressed an equal satisfaction. With a gray beard like 
the foam of the sea, with gray hair through which he 

19 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

continually ran his hands, erect and curly on his fore- 
head, with a hooked nose, a florid complexion, and 
clean, clear eyes, dressed in a blue serge coat, and 
carrying, as a rule, a satchel, to meet him was always, 
as it were, to meet a sailor ashore. And that in es- 
sence was the note of them all. When they were at 
work they desired that everything they did should be 
shipshape; when they set their work down they be- 
came like Jack ashore. And perhaps that is why 
there is, as a rule, such a scarcity of artists in Eng- 
land. Perhaps to what is artistic in the nation the 
sea has always called too strongly. 



II 

THE OUTER RING 

NOVEMBER 7th. Dined with WilHam Ros- 
setti and afterward to Browning's, where there 
was a woman with a large nose. Hope I may never 
meet her again. Browning's conversational powers 
very great. He told some good stories, one about the 
bygone days of Drury Lane — about the advice of a 
very experienced stage-carpenter of fifty years' stand- 
ing at the theatre, given to a young man who wished 
for an engagement there but had not, it was objected, 
voice enough. The advice was to get a pot of XXXX 
(ale) and put it on the stage beside him, and, having 
the boards all to himself, he was first to drink and then 
to halloa with all his might, then to drink again, and 
so on — which the aspirant literally did — remaining, of 
course, a muff, as he had begun. However, I spoil 
that one! Browning said that one evening he was at 
Carlyle's. That sage teacher, after abusing Mozart, 
Beethoven, and modern music generally, let Mrs. 
Carlyle play to show Browning what was the right 
sort of music, which was some Scotch tune on an old 
piano with such base as pleased Providence — or, rather, 

21 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

said Browning, as did not please Providence. An 
Italian sinner, who belonged to the highest degree of 
criminality, which requires some very exalted dignitary 
of the church before absolution can be obtained for 
atrocities too heinous for the powers of the ordinary 
priest, Browning likened to a spider who, having fallen 
into a bottle of ink, gets out and crawls and sprawls 
and blots right over the whole of God's table of laws. 

"... 8th. Painted at William Rossetti's from eight 
till twelve. Gabriel came in. William, wishing to go 
early, Gabriel proposed that he should wait five min- 
utes and they would go together, when, William being 
got to sleep on the sofa, Gabriel commenced telling me 
how he intended to get married at once to Guggums 
(Miss Biddall) — off to Algeria! ! ! and so poor Will- 
iam's five minutes lasted till 2.30 a.m. 

"... I went to a meeting of the sub-committee about 
the testimonial of Ruskin's, he having noticed my 
absence from the previous one with regret. Ruskin 
was playful and childish and the tea-table overcharged 
with cakes and sweets as for a juvenile party. Then 
about an hour later cake and wine were again pro- 
duced, of which Ruskin again partook largely, reach- 
ing out with his thin paw and swiftly absorbing three 
or four large lumps of cake in succession. At home he 
looks young and rompish. At the meeting at Hunt's 
he looked old and ungainly, but his power and elo- 
quence as a speaker were Homeric. But I said at the 
time that but for his speaking he was in appearance 

22 



THE OUTER RING 



like a cross between a fiend and a tallow-chandler. 
... At night to the Working Men's College with 
Gabriel and then a public meeting to hear Professor 
Maurice spouting and Ruskin jawing. Ruskin was 
as eloquent as ever, and is widely popular with the 
men. He flattered Rossetti in his presence hugely 
and spoke of Munroe in conjunction with Baron 
Marochetti as the two noble sculptors whom all the 
aristocracy patronized — and never one word about 
Woolner, whose bust he had just before gone into 
ecstasies about and invited to dinner. This at a mo- 
ment when Woolner's pupils of the college were all 
present. Rossetti says Ruskin is a sneak and loves 
him, Rossetti, because he is one, too, and Hunt he half 
likes because he is half a sneak, but he hates Woolner 
because he is manly and straightforward, and me be- 
cause I am ditto. He adored Millais because Millais 
was the prince of sneaks, but Millais was too much so, 
for he sneaked away his wife and so he is obliged to 
hate him for too much of his favorite quality. Ros- 
setti, in fact, was in such a rage about Ruskin and 
Woolner that he bullied Munroe all the way home, 
wishing to take every cab he encountered. 

" January 27th. To Jones's (Sir Edward Burne- 
Jones) yesterday evening with an outfit that Emma 
had purchased at his request for a poor, miserable girl 
of seventeen he had met in the streets at 2 a.m. The 
coldest night this winter — scarcely any clothes, and 
starving, after five weeks of London life. Jones gave 

23 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

her money and told her to call next morning, which 
she did, telling her story and that she had parents will- 
ing to receive her back again in the country. Jones 
got me to ask Emma to buy her this outfit and has sent 
her home this morning. Jones brought Miss Mac- 
donald and I didn't ask any questions. (Miss 
Macdonald is now Lady Burne- Jones.) This little 
girl seems to threaten to turn out another genius. She 
is coming here to paint to-morrow. Her designs in 
pen-and-ink show real intellect. Jones is going to cut 
Topsy (William Morris). He says his overbearing 
temper is becoming quite insupportable as well as his 
conceit. At Manchester, to give one recording line to 
it, all that I remember is that an old English picture 
with Richard II. in it was the only beautiful work of 
the old masters, and Hunt and Millais the only fine 
among the new. Hunt, in fact, made the exhibition. 
The music was jolly and the waiters tried very hard 
to cheat." 

Such were the daily preoccupations of this small 
circle as recorded — with a spelling whose barbarity I 
have not attempted to reproduce — in Madox Brown's 
diary. If the bickerings seem unreasonably ferocious, 
let it be remembered that in spite of them the unions 
were very close. Rossetti, who called Ruskin and 
himself sneaks, put up with Ruskin's eccentricities and 
Ruskin put up with Rossetti's incredible and trying pe- 
culiarities for many years, and Burne- Jones, who was 

24 




SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 



FROM PORTRAIT PAINTED BY G. F WATTS. 
COURTESY OF FREDERICK KEPPEL 



THE OUTER RING 



going cO cut Topsy for good, retained for this friend of 
his to the end of their hves a friendship which is among 
the most touching of modern times. And the secret of 
it is, no doubt, to be found in the spirit of the last pas- 
sage that I have quoted. These men might say that 
So-and-so was a sneak, or that some one else was the 
prince of sneaks, but they said also that So-and-so 
"made" an exhibition with his pictures, and that the 
other man's were the finest of modern works. It was 
the strong personalities that made them bicker con- 
stantly, but it was the strong personalities that gave 
them their devotion to their art, and it was the de- 
votion to their art that held them all together. It 
is for this reason that these painters and these 
poets, distinguished by singular merits and by de- 
merits as singular, m"ade upon the English-speaking 
world a mark such as perhaps no body of men has 
made upon intellectual Anglo-Saxondom since the days 
of Shakespeare. For it is one of the saddening things 
in Anglo-Saxon life that any sort of union for an 
aesthetic or for an intellectual purpose seems to be 
almost an impossibility. Anglo-Saxon writers, as a 
rule, sit in the British Islands, each on his little hill 
surrounded each by his satellites, moodily jealous 
of the fame of each of his rivals, incapable of 
realizing that the strength of several men together 
is very much stronger than the combined strengths 
of the same number of men acting apart. But it 
was the union of these men in matters of art that 

25 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

gave them their driving force against a world which 
very much did not want them. They pushed their 
way among buyers; they pushed their way into ex- 
hibitions, and it was an absolutely certain thing that 
as soon as one of them had got a foothold he never 
rested until he had helped in as many of his friends 
as the walls would hold. With just the same frenzy 
as, in private and among themselves, these men pro- 
claimed each other sneaks, muffs, and even thieves 
— with exactly the same frenzy did they declare 
each other to picture buyers to be great and in- 
comparable geniuses. And, as may be observed by 
the foregoing quotations, for any one of them to leave 
the other of them out of his praises was to commit the 
unpardonable sin. So, bickering like swashbucklers 
or like school-boys about wine, women, and song, 
they pushed onward to prosperity and to fame. 

In those days there was in England a class of rich 
merchants which retained still the mediaeval idea that 
to patronize the arts had about it a sort of super-virtue. 
Such patronage had for them something glamourous, 
something luxurious, something splendid. They were 
mostly in the north and in the Midlands. Thus there 
were Peter Millar, of Liverpool ; George Rae, of 
Birkenhead ; Leathart, of Gateshead, and Plint, of 
Birmingham. And while the artists strove among 
themselves, so did these patrons, each with his own 
eccentricities, contend for their works. They were 
as a rule almost as bluff as the artists, and they had 

26 



THE OUTER RING 



also almost as keen a belief that the fine arts could 
save a man's soul. Here is a portrait of one of these 
buyers — Mr. Peter Millar, a ship owner of Liverpool, 
who supported out of his own pocket several artists 
of merit sufficient to let them starve. His name 
should have its little niche among the monuments 
devoted to Good Samaritans and to merchant princes: 
"I may notice that Mr. Millar's hospitality is some- 
what peculiar in its kind. His dinner, which is at six, 
is of one joint and vegetable, without pudding. Bottled 
beer for only drink — I never saw any wine. His wife 
dines at another table with his daughters. After 
dinner he instantly hurries you off to tea and then back 
again to smoke. He calls it a meat tea and boasts that 
few people who have ever dined with him have come 
back again. All day long I was going here and there 
with him, dodging back to his office to smoke and then 
off again after something fresh. The chief things I 
saw were chain cables forged and Hilton's 'Cruci- 
fixion,' which is jolly fine. . . . This Millar is a jolly, 
kind old man with streaming white hair, fine features, 
and a beautiful keen eye, like Mulready, and some- 
thing like John Cross, too. A rich brogue, a pipe of 
Cavendish, and a smart rejoinder with a pleasant word 
for every man, woman, or child he meets in the streets 
are characteristic of him. His house is full of pictures 
even to the kitchen, which is covered with them. Many 
he has at all his friends' houses in Liverpool, and his 
house in Bute is filled with his inferior ones. Many 
3 27 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

splendid Linnells, fine Constables, and good Turners, 
and works by a Fenchman, Dellefant, are among the 
most marked of his collection, plus a host of good 
pictures by Liverpool artists, Davis, Tongue, and 
Windus chiefly." 

These extracts from Madox Brown's diary belong 
to a period somewhat earlier than that of which I wrote 
in the preceding chapter. They show the movement 
getting ready, as it were, to move faster, but moving 
already, and they reveal the principal figures very much 
as they were. And gradually these principal actors 
attracted to themselves each a host of satellites, of 
parasites, of dependents, of disciples. Some of these 
achieved fame and died; some of them sponged all 
their lives and died in the King's Bench Prison; some 
achieved fame and disgrace; some, like Mr. William 
de Morgan, still live and have honorable renown; 
some, like Meredith and like Whistler, became early 
detached from the great swarm, to shine, solitary 
planets in the sky. But there are very few of the older 
or of the lately deceased men of prominence in the arts 
who were not in one way or other connected with this 
Old Circle. Thus Swinburne, young, golden-haired, 
golden-tongued, and spendid, was the constant com- 
panion of Rossetti and his wife, the almost legendary 
Miss Siddall, and later a very frequent inmate of the 
house in Fitzroy Square. And, indeed, the bonds be- 
tween this poet and this painter were closer than any 
such statements can imply. Meredith's connection 

28 




ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 



THE OUTER RING 



with the movement was, as to its facts, somewhat more 
mysterious, but is none the less readily comprehensible. 
What has been called the famous "Ham and Egg" 
story seems to put Mr. Meredith in the somewhat 
ridiculous position of being unable to face the spectacle 
of ham and eggs upon Rossetti's breakfast table; but 
this was very unlike Mr. Meredith, who, delicate and 
austere poet as he was, had, as a novelist, a proper 
appreciation for the virtues of such things as beef and 
ale. The position of Mr. Meredith in the house- 
hold at Cheyne Walk — a large mansion that in Tudor 
days had been the Dower House of the Queens of 
England and in which, at one time, D. G. Rossetti, 
William Rossetti, Swinburne, and Meredith attempted 
a not very successful communal household — the posi- 
tion of Mr. Meredith in this settlement remains a 
little mysterious. The ham-and-egg story made it 
appear that Mr, Meredith did not stop for more than 
one minute in the establishment, but fled at the sight 
of the substantial foods upon the table. In a letter to 
the English Review of last year Mr. Meredith alto- 
gether denied the ham-and-egg story, pointing out 
that his version of the affair would be that, during a 
stay of an indefinite period in the household at Cheyne 
Walk, he had observed with alarm Rossetti's habit of 
consuming large quantities of meat and neglecting al- 
together to take exercise. Mr. Edward Clodd, on the 
other hand, informed me the other day that Meredith 
had assured him that he had never lived with Rossetti 

29 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

at all. I have, however, in my possession letters 
which, by their date, prove that Mr. Meredith lived 
there at least one month in the household at Cheyne 
Walk. Madox Brown's own version of the episode 
— and he was so constantly at Cheyne Walk that his 
story, if picturesque, has in it the possibility of truth 
— Madox Brown's story was as follows: 

The Pre-Raphaelite painters and writers were at- 
tracted earlier than any other men by the merits and 
charms of Mr. Meredith's poems. From this connec- 
tion sprang an acquaintanceship between Rossetti and 
Meredith, and the acquaintanceship led to the sugges- 
tion by Rossetti that Meredith should make a fourth 
in the household. This suggestion Meredith accepted. 
The arrangement was that each of the four men should 
contribute his share of the rent and of household bills, 
but Mr. Meredith was at that time in circumstances 
of an extreme poverty and, while paying his rent, he 
was unable or unwilling to join in the household ex- 
penses. Thus he never appeared at table. This 
may have been because he disliked the food; but the 
Pre-Raphaelites imagined that he was starving him- 
self for the sake of pride. They attempted, therefore, 
by sending up small breakfast dishes to his room and 
by similar attentions to provide him with some meas- 
ure of comfort. It is possible that these dishes dis- 
gusted him, but it is still more possible that they dis- 
turbed his pride, which was considerable. According 
to Madox Brown, the end came one day when the 

30 



THE OUTER RING 



benevolent poets substituted for the cracked boots 
which he put outside his door to be cleaned a new pair 
of exactly the same size and make. He put on the 
boots, went out, and, having forwarded a check for 
the quarter's rent, never returned. 

But supposing this story to be a mere delusion of 
Madox Brown's — though I can well believe it to be 
true enough — there is no reason why something of the 
sort should not have happened, and why Meredith 
should not equally truthfully represent that Rossetti's 
methods of housekeeping were trying to his refined 
sensibilities. For in person and in habits Mr. Mere- 
dith, with his mordant humor, his clean, quick in- 
telligence, and his impatience of anything approaching 
the slovenly, was exactly the man to suffer the keenest 
anguish in any household that was conducted by the 
poet-artist. It is true that at that time Rossetti was 
not sole ruler of the house, but he was certainly the 
dominant spirit, and his was a spirit in matters of the 
world easy-going, disorderly, and large in the extreme. 
You have to consider the Cheyne Walk house as a 
largeish, rather gloomy Queen Anne mansion with 
portions of a still older architecture. The furnishings 
were in no sense aesthetic. It is true there were rather 
garish sofas designed for and executed by Morris & 
Company, but most of the things had been picked up 
by Rossetti without any particular regard for coherence 
of aesthetic scheme. Gilded sunfishes hung from the 
ceilings along with drop lustres of the most excruciat- 

31 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

ingly Victorian type, and gilded lamps from the palace 
of George IV, at Brighton. There were all sorts of 
chinoiseries, cabinets, screens, blue china, and pea- 
cocks' feathers. The dustbins were full of priceless 
plates off which Rossetti dined and which the servants 
broke in the kitchen. Rossetti, in fact, surrounded 
himself with anything that he could find that was 
quaint and bizarre, whether of the dead or the live 
world. So that the image of his house, dominated as 
it was by his wonderful personality, was that of a sin- 
gular warren of oddities. Speaking impressionisti- 
cally we may say that supposing an earthquake had 
shaken the house down, or, still more, supposing that 
some gigantic hand could have taken it up and shaken 
its contents out as from a box, there would have issued 
out a most extraordinary collection — raccoons, arma- 
dillos, wombats, a Zebu bull, peacocks, models, mis- 
tresses, and an army of queer male and female "bad 
hats," who might be as engagingly criminal as they 
liked as long as they were engaging, as long as they 
were quaint, as long as they were interesting. They 
cadged on Rossetti, they stole from him, they black- 
mailed him, they succeeded, indeed, in driving him 
mad; but I think they all worshipped him. He had, 
in fact, a most extraordinary gift of inspiring en- 
thusiasm, this singular, Italianate man, who had 
all an Italian's powers of extracting money from 
clients, who worried people to death with his eccen- 
tricities, who drove them crazy with his jealousies, who 

32 




JAMES MNEILL WHISTLER 

FROM A SKETCH FROM LIFE BY RAJON. COURTESY OF FREDERICK KEPPEL 



THE OUTER RING 



charmed them into ecstasies with his tongue and with 
his eyes. "Why is he not some great king?" wrote 
one Pre-Raphaehte poet who was stopping with him, 
to another, "that we might lay down our hves for 
him ?" And curiously enough, one of the watchers at 
Whistler's bedside during that painter's last hours has 
informed me that, something to the discredit of Ros- 
setti having been uttered in conversation. Whistler 
opened his eyes and said: "You must not say any- 
thing against Rossetti. Rossetti was a king." 

This may have been said partly to tease his listeners, 
whose styles of painting were anything rather than 
Rossettian, but Whistler certainly received nothing 
but kindness at the hands of the Pre-Raphaelite group. 
Looking through some old papers the other day I came 
upon a circular that Madox Brown had had printed, 
drawing the attention of all his old patrons to the merits 
of Whistler's etchings, and begging them in the most 
urgent terms to make purchases because Whistler was 
" a great genius." 

Now, upon one occasion Madox Brown, going to a 
tea-party at the Whistlers' in Chelsea, was met in the 
hall by Mrs. Whistler, who begged him to go to the 
poulterer's and purchase a pound of butter. The 
bread was cut, but there was nothing to put upon it. 
There was no money in the house, the poulterer had 
cut off his credit, and, Mrs. Whistler said, she dare not 
send her husband, for he would certainly punch that 
tradesman's head. 

33 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

So that not nearly all the men whom this circle en- 
couraged, helped, taught, or filled with the contagion 
of enthusiasm were by any means ignoble. Indeed, 
every one of them had some quality or other. Thus 
there was a painter whom we will call P., whose 
indigence was remarkable, but whose talents are now 
considerably recognized. This painter had a chance 
of a commission to make illustrations for a guide-book 
dealing with Wales. The commission, however, de- 
pended upon the drawings meeting with approval, and 
Mr. P., being without the necessary means of paying 
for his travels, applied to Madox Brown for a loan. 
Madox Brown produced the money, and then, re- 
membering that he had intended to take a holiday 
himself, decided to accompany his friend. They ar- 
rived upon a given morning toward two o'clock in some 
Welsh watering-place, having walked through the day 
and a greater part of the night with their knapsacks 
on their backs. They were unable to rouse anybody 
at the inn, there was not a soul in the streets, there was 
nothing but a long esplanade with houses whose win- 
dows gave onto the ground. 

"Well, I'm going to have a sleep," P. said. "But 
that is impossible," Madox Brown answered. "Not 
at all," P. rejoined with a happy confidence; and, 
pulling his knapsack round his body, he produced his 
pallet-knife. With this in his hand, to the horror of 
Madox Brown, he approached the drawing-room 
window of one of the lodging-houses. He slipped the 

34 



THE OUTER RING 



knife through the crack, pushed back the catch, opened 
the window and got in, followed eventually by his more 
timid companion. Having locked the door from the 
inside to prevent intrusion, they lay down upon the 
sofa and on chairs and proceeded to sleep till the 
morning, when they got out of the window, once more 
closed it, and went on their way. I have always 
wondered what the housemaid thought in the morning 
when she came down and found the drawing-room 
door locked from the inside. 

On the next night they appeared to be in an almost 
similar danger of bedlessness. They arrived at a 
small village which contained only one inn, and that 
was filled with a large concourse of Welsh-speaking 
people. The landlord, speaking rather broken Eng- 
lish, told them that they could not have a room or a 
bed. There was a room with two beds in it, but they 
could not have it. This enraged Mr. P. beyond de- 
scription. He vowed that not only would he have 
the law on the landlord, but he would immediately 
break his head; and Mr. P. being a redoubtable 
boxer, his threat was no mean one. So that, having 
consulted with his Welsh friends, the host made signs 
to them that they could have the room in an hour, 
which he indicated by pointing at the clock. In an 
hour, accordingly, they were ushered into a room 
which contained a large and comfortable double bed. 
Mr. P. undressed and retired. Madox Brown simi- 
larly undressed and was about to step into bed 'when 

35 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

he placed his bare foot upon something of an exceed- 
ingly ghastly coldness. He gave a cry which roused 
Mr. P. Mr. P. sprang from the bed, and, bending 
down, caught hold of a man's hand. He proceeded 
to drag out the man, who displayed a throat cut from 
ear to ear. *'Oh, is that all }" Mr. P. said, and having 
shoved the corpse under the bed he retired upon it and 
slept tranquilly. Madox Brown passed the night in 
the coffee-room. 

Upon this walking tour Mr. P. picked up a gypsy 
girl who afterward served as a model to many famous 
academicians. He carried her off with him to London, 
where he installed her in his studio. There was 
nothing singular about this; but what amazed Mr. P.'s 
friends was the fact that Mr. P., the most bellicose of 
mortals, from that moment did not issue outside his 
house. The obvious reason for this was a gypsy of 
huge proportion and forbidding manner who had 
taken up his quarters at a public-house at the corner 
of the street. P.'s friends gibed at him for his want of 
courage, but P. continued sedulously and taciturnly 
to paint. At last he volunteered the information that 
he could not afford to damage his hands before he had 
finished his academy picture. The picture finished, 
he sallied forth at once, knocked all the teeth down 
the gypsy's throat, and incidentally broke both his 
knuckles. The gypsy girl was credited with the retort 
that was once famous in London. When P., who had 
been given a box at the Opera, proposed to take her 

36 



THE OUTER RING 



with him, she refused obdurately to accompany him, 
and for a long time would give no reason. Being 
pressed, she finally blurted out: "Ye don't put a toad 
in your waistcoat pocket." In this saying she under- 
rated the charm of one who, till quite a short time 
ago, was a popular and beloved hostess in London, 
for she married one of P.'s wealthiest patrons, while 
poor P. remained under a necessity of borrowing 
small loans to the end of his life. 



Ill 

tJLOOM AND THE POETS 

IT has always seemed at first sight a mystery to me 
how in the seventies and eighties such an inor- 
dinate number of poets managed to Hve in the gloom 
of central London. Nowadays English poets live, 
as far as 1 know — and I have reasons for knowing 
the addresses of an infinite number of them — English 
poets live — they cannot by any stretch of imagination 
be said to flourish, unless they have what is called 
private means — they live in Bedford Park, a few in 
Chelsea, and a great many in the country. Bedford 
Park is a sort of rash of villas crowded not so very 
close together or so very far out of town; Chelsea has 
the river to give it air. At any rate, the poets of to-day 
crowd toward the light. 

But in those old days they seemed filled with a 
passion for gloom. For I cannot imagine anything 
much more Cimmerian than Bloomsbury and the 
west central districts of the capital of England. Yet 
here — I am speaking only impressionistically — all the 
Pre-Raphaelite poets seemed to crowd together, full of 
enthusiasm, pouring forth endless songs about the 

38 



GLOOM AND THE POETS 



loves of Launcelot and Guinevere, about music and 
moonlight. You have to think of it as a region of 
soot-blackened brick houses, with here and there black 
squares whose grimy trees reach up into a brownish 
atmosphere. What there is not black is brownish. 

Yet here all these dead poets seemed to live. Fitzroy 
Square, of which I have written, is such a square; the 
Rossettis always circled round Bloomsbury. Though 
D. G. Rossetti travelled as far afield as Chelsea, 
William Rossetti until very lately lived in Euston 
Square, which, to celebrate a murder, changed its 
name to Endsleigh Gardens; and Christina — who for 
me is the most satisfactory of all the poets of the 
nineteenth century — died in times of fog in Woburn 
Square. 

I suppose they sang of Launcelot and Guinevere 
to take their own minds off their surroundings, having 
been driven into their surroundmgs by the combined 
desire for cheap rents and respectable addresses. Some 
of them were conscious of the gloom, some no doubt 
were not. Mr. Joaquin Miller, coming from Nica- 
ragua and Arizona to stay for a time in Gower Street 
— surely the longest, the grayest, and the most cruel 
of all London streets — this author of "Songs of the 
Sierras" was greeted rapturously by the Pre-Raphael- 
ite poets, and wrote of life in London as a rush, a 
whirl, a glow — all the motion of the world. He wrote 
ecstatically and at the same time with humility, 
pouring out his verses as one privileged to be at table 

39 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

with all the great ones of the earth. In the mornings 
he rode in the Row among the "swells," wearing a 
red shirt, cowboy boots and a sombrero; in the evening 
he attended in the same costume at the dinners of the 
great intellectuals, where brilliantly he was a feature. 
Had he not been with Walker, the filibuster, in Nica- 
ragua .? I can dimly remember the face of Mark 
Twain — or was it Bret Harte .? — standing between 
open folding doors at a party, gazing in an odd, 
puzzled manner at this brilliant phenomena. I fancy 
the great writer, whichever it was, was not too 
pleased that this original should represent the manners 
and customs of the United States in the eyes of the 
poets. Mr. Miller did them good, if it were an in- 
justice to Boston. He represented for the poets 
Romance. 

But if Mr. Miller saw in London life, light, and the 
hope of fame, and if some others of the poets saw it 
in similar terms, there were others who saw the city in 
terms realistic enough. Thus poor James Thomson, 
writing as B. V., sang of the City of Dreadful Night, 
and, we are told, drank himself to death. That was 
the grisly side of it. If you were a poet you lived in 
deep atmospheric gloom and, to relieve yourself, to see 
color, you must sing of Launcelot and Guinevere. 
If the visions would not come, you must get stimulants 
to give you them. I remember as a child being present 
in the drawing-room of a relative just before a dinner 
at which Tennyson and Browning had been asked to 

40 



GLOOM AND THE POETS 

meet a rising poet to whom it was desired to give a 
friendly lift. It was the longest and worst quarter of 
an hour possible. The celebrities fidgeted, did not 
talk, looked in Olympian manner at their watches. 
At last they went in to dinner without the young poet. 
I was too little and too nervous to tell them that half 
an hour before I had seen the poor fellow lying hope- 
lessly drunk across a whelk-stall in the Euston Road. 
One of the grimmest stories that I have heard 
even of that time and neighborhood was told me 
by the late Mr. William Sharp. Mr. Sharp was him- 
self a poet of the Pre-Raphaelites, though later he 
wrote as Fiona Macleod, and thus joined the Celtic 
school of poetry that still flourishes in the person of 
Mr. W. B. Yeats. Mr. Sharp had gone to call on 
Philip Marston, the blind author of " Songtide,'* and 
of many other poems that in that day were considered 
to be a certain passport to immortality. Going up the 
gloomy stairs of a really horrible house near Gower 
Street Station, he heard proceeding from the blind 
poet's rooms a loud sound of growling, punctuated 
with muffled cries for help. He found the poor blind 
man in the clutches of the poet I have just omitted to 
name, crushed beneath him and, I think, severely 
bitten. This poet had had an attack of delirium 
tremens and imagined himself a Bengal tiger. Leaving 
Marston, he sprang on all fours toward Sharp, but 
he burst a blood-vessel and collapsed on the floor. 
Sharp lifted him onto the sofa, took Marston into 

41 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

another room, and then rushed hatless through the 
streets to the hospital that was round the corner. 
The surgeon in charge, himself drunk and seeing 
Sharp covered with blood, insisted on giving him in 
charge for murder; Sharp, always a delicate man, 
fainted. The poet was dead of hemorrhage before 
assistance reached him. 

But in gloom and amid horror they sang on 
bravely of Launcelot and Guinevere, Merlin and 
Vivien, ballads of Staffs and Scrips, of music and 
moonlight. They did not — that is to say — much look 
at the life that was around them; in amid the glooms 
they built immaterial pleasure-houses. They were 
not brave enough — that, I suppose, is why they are 
very few of them remembered, and few of them great. 

I have, however, very little sense of proportion in 
this particular matter. There were Philip Bourke 
Marston, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, "B. V.," Theo 
Marzials, Gordon Hake, Christina Rossetti, Mr. 
Edmund Gosse, Mr. Hall Caine, Oliver Madox 
Brown, Mr. Watts Dunton, Mr. Swinburne, D. G. 
Rossetti, Robert Browning! . . . All these names have 
been exceedingly familiar to my mouth and ears ever 
since I could speak or hear. In their own day each 
of them was a great and serious fact. For there was 
a time — ^yes, really there was a time! — when the pub- 
lication of a volume of poems was still an event — an 
event making great names and fortunes not merely 
mediocre. I do not mean to say that in the seventies 

42 



GLOOM AND THE POETS 

and eighties carriages still blocked Albemarle Street; 
but if Mr. O'Shaughnessy was understood to be put- 
ting the finishing touches to the proof-sheets of his 
next volume there arose an immense excitement 
among all the other poets, and all the Pre-Raphaelite 
circle and all the outsiders connected with the circle, 
and all the connections of all the outsiders. What the 
book was going to be like was discussed eagerly. So- 
and-so was understood to have seen the proof-sheets, and 
what the AthetKzum would say, or what the Athenceum 
did say, excited all the circumjacent authors quite 
as much as nowadays the winning of the Derby by a 
horse belonging to his Majesty the King. All these 
things are most extraordinarily changed. Small vol- 
umes of poems descend upon one's head in an unceas- 
ing shower. They come so quick that one cannot 
even imagine that the authors have time themselves 
to read the proof-sheets. How much less, then, their 
friends ? But as for fame or fortune ! . . . 

I am acquainted with an author — I am much too 
well acquainted with an author — who one day had what 
in the language of the nineties was called a "boom." 
At the height of this agreeable period he published a 
volume of poems. It cannot be said that the press 
did not receive him rapturously: he received a column 
and a half of praise in the Daily Telegraph, something 
more than a column in the Daily Chronicle , just over 
two columns in the Times itself, and three lines of 
contempt in the Spectator, which alone in the eighties 

4 43 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

would have sufficed to make the fortune of any poet. 
Of this volume of poems, heralded and boomed as it 
was and published in the year 1908, the public de- 
manded seventeen copies. Exactly seventeen! I 
remember being informed by a person in authority 
that the sale of the last volume of poems that Swin- 
burne published was exactly six hundred copies, of 
which four hundred and eighty were bought in 
Germany, leaving one hundred and twenty enthusiasts 
for the British Isles and the rest of the Continent. 
And this seems to me to be a record of indifference 
heroic in itself. I do not know that it is a record 
particularly interesting, however, to anybody who is 
not interested in poets. But faced with these facts 
both of the outside and inside, I may well be excused 
if I say that I have not any sense of proportion, or 
any but the remotest idea as to the relative value of 
the Pre-Raphaelite or semi-Pre-Raphaelite poets. 

My childhood was in many respects a singular one. 
The names of these distinguished persons were as 
much in daily use in my grandfather's house when I 
was a child, and many of the distinguished persons 
were nearly as often in the house itself, as are in Eng- 
land such ordinary household things as Black's mus- 
tard, Dash's Worcestershire sauce, or as, in the case 
of the United States, that beverage which lately I saw 
everywhere advertised in enormous letters that seemed 
to flame from New York to Philadelphia conveying 
the command, "Drink Boxie. You will not like it 

44 



GLOOM AND THE POETS 

at first." I could not think that D. G. Rossetti 
was a person any more remarkable than the gentle- 
man with gold braid round his hat who opened for 
me the locked gates of Fitzroy Square, or that when I 
shook hands with a clergyman called Franz Liszt was 
it any more of an event than when, as I was enjoined 
to do, I performed the same ceremony with the cook's 
husband. Dimly, but with vivid patches, I remem- 
ber being taken for a walk by my father along 
what appeared to me to be a graystone quay. I pre- 
sume it was the Chelsea Embankment. There we 
met a very old, long-bearded man. He frightened me 
quite as much as any of the other great Victorian 
figures, who, to the eye of a child, appeared monu- 
mental, loud-voiced, and distressing. This particular 
gentleman at the instance of my grandfather related 
to me how he had once been at Weimar. In a garden 
restaurant beneath a May-tree in bloom he had seen 
Schiller and Goethe drinking coffee together. He had 
given a waiter a thaler to be allowed to put on a white 
apron and to wait upon these two world-shaking men, 
who, in court dress with wigs and swords, sat at a 
damask-covered table. He had waited upon them. 
Later, I remember that while I was standing with my 
father beside the doorstep in Tite Street of the house 
that he was entering, I fell down and he bent over to 
assist me to rise. His name was Thomas Carlyle, but 
he is almost confounded in my mind with a gentleman 
called Pepper. Pepper very much resembled Carlyle, 

45 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

except that he was exceedingly dirty. He used to sell 
penny-dreadfuls, which I was forbidden to purchase, 
and I think the happiest times of my childhood were 
spent in a large coal-cellar. Into this I used to lock 
myself to read of the exploits of Harkaway Dick, who 
lived in a hollow tree, possessed a tame black panther, 
and a pair of Winchester repeating-rifles, with which 
at one sitting he shot no less than forty-five pirates 
through a loophole in the bark of the tree. I think 
I have never since so fully tasted of the joys of 
life, not even when Captain Hook . . . but what 
was even Peter Pan to compare with Harkaway 
Dick ? 

There were all these things jumbled up in my 
poor little mind together. I presume I should not 
remember half so vividly the story of Carlyle and the 
author of "Wilhelm Meister" if my father had not 
subsequently frequently jogged my memory upon the 
point. My father was a man of an encyclopaedic 
knowledge and had a great respect for the attainments 
of the distinguished. He used, I remember, habitu- 
ally to call me "the patient but extremely stupid 
donkey." This phrase occurred in Mavor's spelling- 
book, which he read as a boy in the city of Miinster 
in Westphalia, where he was born. He had a memory 
that was positively extraordinary, and a gift of lan- 
guages no less great. Thus while his native language 
was German, he was for a long course of years musical 
critic to the Timesy London correspondent to The 

46 



GLOOM AND THE POETS 

Frankfurter Zeitungy London musical correspondent 
to Le Menestrel of Paris, and the Tribuna, Rome. 
He was also, I believe, in his day the greatest au- 
thority upon the Troubadours and the Romance Lan- 
guages, and wrote original poems in modern Proven- 
cal, and he was a favorite pupil of Schopenhauer, 
and the bad boy of his family. He was a doctor of 
philosophy of Gottingen University, at that time 
premier university of Germany, though he had made 
his studies at the inferior institution in Berlin. From 
Berlin he was expelled because of his remarkable 
memory. The circumstances were as follows: 

My father occupied a room in a hotel which had a 
balcony overlooking the Spree. In the same hotel, but 
in the next room, there dwelt the rector of the univer- 
sity, and it happened that one of the Prussian princes 
was to be present at the ceremony of conferring de- 
grees. Thus one evening my father was sitting upon 
his balcony, while next door the worthy rector read the 
address that he was afterward to deliver to the prince. 
Apparently the younger members of the institution 
addressed the prince before the dons. At any rate, 
my father, having heard it only once, delivered word 
for word the rector's speech to his Royal Highness. 
The result was that the poor man, who spoke only 
with difficulty, had not a single word to say, and my 
father was forthwith expelled without his degree. 
Being, though freakish, a person of spirit, that same 
day he took the express to Gottingen and, as a result, 

47 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

in the evening he telegraphed to his mother: "Have 
passed for doctor with honors at Gottingen," to the 
consternation of his parents, who had not yet heard 
of his expulsion from Berlin. The exploit pleased 
nobody. Berlin did not desire that he should be a 
doctor at all; Gottingen was disgusted that a student 
from an inferior university should have passed out on 
top of their particular tree, and I believe that in 
consequence in Germany of to-day a student can 
only take his doctor at his own particular univer- 
sity. 

It was at the suggestion of Schopenhauer, or, 
possibly, because his own lively disposition made 
parts of Germany too hot to hold him, that Doctor 
Hueffer came to England. He had letters of intro- 
duction to various men of letters in England, for, for 
time out of mind, in the city of Miinster the Hueffer 
family had belonged to the class that battens upon 
authors. They have been, that is to say, printers and 
publishers. Following his intention of spreading the 
light of Schopenhauer in England, that country for 
which Schopenhauer had so immense a respect, 
Doctor Hueffer founded a periodical called The 
New Quarterly Review, which caused him to lose a 
great deal of money and to make cordial enemies 
among the poets and literary men to whom he gave 
friendly lifts. I fancy that the only traces of The 
New Quarterly Review are contained in the limer- 
ick by Rossetti which runs as follows: 

48 



GLOOM AND THE POETS 

"There was a young German called HufFer, 
A hypochondriacal buffer; 

To shout Schopenhauer 

From the top of a tower 
Was the highest enjoyment of Huffer." 

In London Dr. Hueffer lived first in Chelsea, half- 
way between Rossetti and Carlyle, who were both, I 
believe, very much attached to him for various reasons. 
Indeed, one of the first things that I can remember, 
or seem to remember, for the memory is probably 
inaccurate, is that I lay in my cradle among proof- 
sheets of Rossetti's poems which my father was 
amiably occupied in reading for the press. 

In their day Rossetti's limericks were celebrated. 
I do not know whether they have ever been collected. 
I certainly seem to remember having heard that some 
one was, or is, engaged in collecting them. In that 
case I may here make him a present of one more which 
was written on the flyleaf of a volume of "Lear's 
Nonsense Verses" presented by the poet to Oliver 
Madox Brown: 

"There was a young rascal called Nolly, 
Whose habits, though dirty, were jolly; 
And when this book comes 
To be marked with his thumbs, 
You may know that its owner is Nolly," 

This engaging trait may perhaps be capped by an 
anecdote related of another poet, a descendant of 

49 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

many Pre-Raphaelites, of whom it was related that 
while reading his friend's valuable books at that 
friend's breakfast table he was in the habit of marking 
his place with a slice of bacon. 

This excellent and touching anecdote I know to be 
untrue, but it is to this day being related of one living 
poet by the wife of a living painter of distinction, she 
herself being to some extent of Pre-Raphaelite con- 
nection. Such as it is it goes to show that the habit 
of anecdote, incisive, however wanting in veracity, 
is still remaining; to the surviving connections of this 
Old Circle. For whatever may have been the value 
of the poetic gifts of these poets, there cannot be any 
doubt that in their private conversation they had singu- 
lar gifts of picturesque narration. And certainly 
picturesque things were in the habit of happening to 
them — odd, irresponsible, and partaking perhaps a 
little of nightmares. I remember as a boy being set 
somewhat inconsiderately the task of conveying home 
a very distinguished artist, practising, however, an 
art other than that of poetry. We had been at a 
musical evening in the neighborhood of Swiss Cottage, 
and arrived at the Underground Station just before 
the last train came in. My enormously distinguished 
temporary ward was in the habit of filling one of his 
trousers pockets with chocolate creams, and the other 
with large, unset diamonds. With the chocolate 
creams he was accustomed to solace his sense of taste 
while he sat in the artists' room waiting for his turn 

50 



GLOOM AND THE POETS 

to play. With the diamonds on similar occasions he 
solaced his sense of touch, plunging his hand among 
them and moving them about luxuriously. He would 
have sometimes as many as twenty or thirty large 
and valuable stones. On this occasion M., always 
an excitable person, was in a state of extreme rage; 
for at the party where he had played M. Saint- 
Saens, the composer, had also been invited to play 
the piano. As far as I can remember, Saint-Saens 
was not a very good pianist; he had the extremely 
hard touch of the organist, and M. considered that 
to have invited him to sit down on the same piano 
stool was an insult almost beyond bearing. 

The platform of the Underground Railway was 
more than usually gloomy, since, the last down train 
having gone, the lamps upon the other platform 
had been extinguished. M. volleyed and thun- 
dered, and, at last, just as the train came in, he 
thrust both his hands into his trousers pockets and 
then waved them wildly above his head in execra- 
tion of my insufficient responsiveness. There flew 
from the one pocket a shower of chocolate creams, 
from the other a shower of large diamonds. M. gave 
a final scream upon a very high note and plunged 
into a railway carriage. I was left divided as to 
whether my duty were toward the maestro or his 
jewels. I suppose it was undue materialism in myself, 
but I stayed to look after the diamonds. It was a 
long and agonizing search. The station-master, who 

51 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

imagined I was as mad as the vanished musician, in- 
sisted that there were no diamonds, and extinguished 
the station lamps. A friendly porter, however, 
assisted me with a hand-lantern, and eventually we 
recovered about five diamonds, each perhaps as large 
as my little finger nail. Whether any more remained 
upon the platform I never knew, for M. also never 
knew how many jewels he possessed or carried about 
with him. It was a night certainly of nightmare, 
for, being so young a boy, I had not suflRcient money 
to take a cab, and the last train into town had gone. 
I had, therefore, to walk to Claridge's Hotel, a dis- 
tance of perhaps four miles, and, arriving there, I 
could not discover that the porter had seen anything 
of M. I therefore thought it wise to arouse his wife. 
Madame was accustomed to being awakened at all 
hours of the night. Her distinguished husband was 
in the habit of dragging her impetuously out of bed to 
listen to his latest rendering of a passage of Chopin, 
and, indeed, upon this account, she subsequently di- 
vorced the master, such actions being held by the 
French courts to constitute incompatibility of temper- 
ament. She did not, however, take my arousing her 
with any the greater equanimity, and when I produced 
the diamonds she upbraided me violently for having 
lost the master. There ensued a more agonizing period 
of driving about in cabs before we discovered M. de- 
tained at the police station nearest Baker Street. He 
had in his vocabulary no English at all except some very 

52 



GLOOM AND THE POETS 

startling specimens of profanity, and upon arriving at 
Baker Street station hehadspenta considerable amount 
of time and energy in attempting to explain to the ticket 
collector in French that he had lost a sacred charge, 
a weakly little boy incapable of taking care of himself, 
and as he did not even know the name of his hotel, 
the police had taken charge of him and were attempt- 
ing kindly to keep him soothed by singing popular 
songs to him in the charge-room, where we found him 
quite contented and happy, beating time with his feet 
to the melody of "Two Lovely Black Eyes/' I think 
this was upon the whole the unhappiest night I ever 
spent. 

The mention of chocolate creams reminds me of 
another musician who was also a Pre-Raphaelite poet 
— Mr. Theo Marzials. Mr. Marzials was in his 
young days the handsomest, the wittiest, the most 
brilliant, and the most charming of poets. He had a 
career tragic in the extreme, and, I believe, is now 
dead. But he shared with M. the habit of keeping 
chocolate creams loose in his pocket, and on the 
last occasion when I happened to catch sight of him 
looking into a case of stuffed birds at South Kensington 
Museum he had eaten five large chocolates in the space 
of two minutes. As a musician he wrote some very 
charming songs, of which I suppose the best known 
are "Twickenham Ferry," and the canon, "My True 
Love Hath My Heart." He wrote, I believe, only one 
volume of poems, called A Gallery of Pigeons^ but that 

53 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

contains verse of a lyrical and polished sort that, as 
far as my predilections serve, seems to me to be by 
far the most exquisite that were produced by any of 
the lesser Pre-Raphaelite poets. As the volume must 
probably be very rare and is perhaps quite unknown 
nowadays, I venture to reproduce a couple of his 
miniature poems called "Tragedies." They have 
lingered in my memory ever since I was a young 
child: 

" She was only a woman, famish'd for loving. 
Mad with devotion, and such slight things; 
And he was a very great musician. 
And used to finger his fiddle-strings. 

Her heart's sweet gamut is cracking and breaking 
For a look, for a touch — for such slight things; 

But he's such a very great musician. 

Grimacing and fing'ring his fiddle-strings. 

In the warm wax-light one lounged at the spinet, 
And high in the window came peeping the moon; 

At his side was a bowl of blue china, and in it 
Were large blush-roses, and cream, and maroon. 

They crowded, and strain'd, and swoon'd to the music. 
And some to the gild-board languor'd and lay; 

They open'd and breathed, and trembled with pleasure. 
And all the sweet while they were fading away!" 

And here is a third little poem by Marzials which I 
quote because it is headed simply "Chelsea": 

54 



GLOOM AND THE POETS 



" And life is like a pipe, 
And love is the fusee; 
The pipe draws well, but bar the light. 
And what's the use to me ? 

So light it up and puff away- 

An empty morning through, 
And when it's out — why, love is out. 

And life's as well out, too!" 

But I do not know whether this was suggested by 
Rossetti or Carlyle. 

Another of these forgotten, or not quite forgotten, 
geniuses was Oliver Madox Brown, who, though he 
died at the age of eighteen, had proved himself at once 
a painter, a novelist, and a poet. Before his death 
he had exhibited several pictures at the Royal Acad- 
emy, and had published with considerable success one 
novel, leaving two others to be produced after his 
death. He must, indeed, have been a very remarkable 
boy, if we are to believe at all in the sincerity of the 
tributes to his memory left by the distinguished men 
of the Pre-Raphaelite group, and Madox Brown re- 
mained passionately devoted to his memory until his 
dying day. Just before his death Oliver complained 
that his father smelt of tobacco, whereupon Madox 
Brown said: "Very well, my dear, I will never smoke 
again until you are better." And he never again did 
smoke, although before that time he had been a per- 
petual and very heavy smoker. He had, indeed, one 

55 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

singular accomplishment that I have never noticed in 
any other man: With the palette fixed upon his left 
hand he was able to charge and roll a cigarette with 
his right, rubbing the paper against his trousers, and 
doing it with quite extraordinary rapidity, so that the 
feat resembled a conjurer's trick. Oliver Madox 
Brown died of blood-poisoning in 1875, and it was not 
till many years after his death that it was discovered 
that beneath his study, which was at the bottom of the 
old house in Fitzroy Square, there was a subterranean 
stable whose opening was in the mews behind the 
house, and which had neither drains nor ventilation 
of any kind. So that there cannot be any doubt that 
the emanations from this ancient place of horrors 
were responsible for Oliver's death — so frail a thing 
is genius and so tenuous its hold upon existence. 

As a boy I had a similar study at the back and 
bottom of another old house of Madox Brown's. 
And one of the other most unpleasant memories of 
mine were the incursions made upon me by a 
Pre-Raphaelite poetess, Miss Mathilde Blind. Miss 
Blind was descended from a distinguished family of 
revolutionaries. Indeed, one of the brothers at- 
tempted to assassinate Bismarck, and disappeared, 
without any trace of him ever again being heard of, 
in the dungeons of a Prussian fortress. She was, 
moreover, a favorite pupil of Mazzini, the liberator 
of Italy, and a person in her earlier years of extreme 
beauty and fire. Upon the death of their son and the 

56 



GLOOM AND THE POETS 

marriage of their two daughters, the late Mrs. William 
Rossetti and Mrs. Francis Hueffer, the Madox Browns 
adopted Mathilde Blind, who from thenceforward 
spent most of her time with them. As a boy — I wrote 
my first book when I was sixteen, and its success, alas! 
was more tremendous than any that I can ever again 
know — I would be sitting in my little study intent 
either upon my writing or my school tasks, when 
ominous sounds would be heard at the door. Miss 
Blind, with her magnificent aquiHne features and fine 
gray hair, would enter with her alarming slip-proofs 
dangling from both her hands. "Fordie," she would 
say, "I want a synonym for 'dun.'" On page 152 
of her then volume of poems she would have written 
of dun cows standing in green streams. She was then 
correcting the proofs of page 154, to find that she had 
spoken of the dun cows returning homeward over the 
leas. Some other adjective would have to be found 
for this useful quadruped. Then my bad quarter of 
an hour would commence. I would suggest "straw- 
berry-colored," and she would say that that would not 
fit the metre. I would try "roan," but she would say 
that that would spoil the phonetic syzygy. I did not 
know what that was, but I would next suggest "heif- 
ers," whereupon she would say that heifers did not 
give milk and that, anyhow, the accentuation was 
wrong. I would be reduced to a miserable muteness. 
Miss Blind frightened me out of my Hfe. And rising 
up and gathering her proof-sheets together, the poet- 

57 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

ess, with her Medusa head, would regard me with 
indignant and piercing brown eyes. "Fordie," she 
would say with an awful scrutiny, "your grandfather 
says you are a genius, but I have never been able to 
discover in you any signs but those of your being as 
stupid as a donkey," I never could escape from being 
likened to that other useful quadruped. 

They took themselves with such extreme serious- 
ness — these Pre-Raphaelite poets — and nevertheless 
I have always fancied that they are responsible for the 
death of English poetry. My father once wrote of 
Rossetti that he put down the thoughts of Dante in 
the language of Shakespeare; and the words seem to 
me to be extremely true and extremely damning. For 
what is wanted of a poet is that he should express his 
own thoughts in the language of his own time. This, 
with perhaps the solitary exception of Christina Ros- 
setti, the Pre-Raphaelite poets never thought of. 

I remember once hearing Stephen Crane, the au- 
thor of The Red Badge of Courage and of The Open 
Boatf which is the finest volume of true short stories 
in the English language — I remember hearing him, 
with his wonderful eyes flashing and his extreme vigor 
and intonation, comment upon a sentence of Robert 
Louis Stevenson that he was reading. The sentence 
was: "With interjected finger he delayed the motion 
of the timepiece." "By God, poor dear!" Crane 
exclaimed. "That man put back the clock of English 
fiction fifty years." I do not know that this is exactly 

58 



GLOOM AND THE POETS 

what Stevenson did do. I should say myself that the 
art of writing in English received the numbing blow 
of a sandbag when Rossetti wrote at the age of eigh- 
teen The Blessed Damozel. From that time forward 
and until to-day — and for how many years to come ! — 
the idea has been inherent in the mind of the English 
writer that writing was a matter of digging for obsolete 
words with which to express ideas forever dead and 
gone. Stevenson did this, of course, as carefully as 
any Pre-Raphaelite, though instead of going to 
mediaeval books he ransacked the seventeenth century. 
But this tendency is unfortunately not limited to 
authors misusing our very excellent tongue. The 
other day I was listening to an excellent Italian con- 
ferencier who assured an impressed audience that 
Signor d'Annuncio is the greatest Italian stylist there 
has ever been, since in his last book he has used over 
2,017 obsolete words which cannot be understood by 
a modern Italian without the help of a mediaeval 
glossary. 
5 



IV 

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND PRE-RAPHAELITE LOVE 

IT always appears to me that, whereas D. G. 
Rossetti belongs to a comparatively early period 
of nineteenth - century literature, Christina's was a 
much more modern figure. Dates, perhaps, do not 
bear me out in this, Rossetti was born in the twenties, 
printed his first poem when he was perhaps ten, and 
wrote The Blessed Damozel when he was eighteen. 
On the other hand, his first published volume of 
original poetry did not appear until the late seventies. 
Yet he died in the eighties. Christina Rossetti's 
Goblin Market volume was published in the late 
sixties, but she lived well on into the nineties, and she 
wrote poems until practically the day of her death. 
I am perhaps eccentric when I say that I consider 
Christina Rossetti to be the greatest master of words 
— at least of English words — that the nineteenth cen- 
tury gave us. Her verse at its best is as clean in texture 
and as perfect in the choice of epithet as any of Mau- 
passant's short stories. And although the range of 
her subjects was limited — although it was limited very 
strictly within the bounds of her personal emotions — 

60 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 

yet within those hmits she expressed herself con- 
summately. And it was in this rather more than by 
her dates of publication that she proved herself a poet 
more modern than her brother, who in his day bulked 
so much more largely in the public eye. It was per- 
haps for this reason too that Mr. Ruskin — and in 
this alone he would have earned for himself my 
lasting dislike — that Mr, Ruskin pooh-poohed and 
discouraged Christina Rossetti's efforts at poetry. 
For there is extant at least one letter from the volu- 
minous critic in which he declares that the Gohlin 
Market volume was too slight and too frivolous a 
fascicule to publish, and to the end of his days Mr. 
Ruskin considered that Christina damaged her brother. 
It was not good for Gabriel's fame or market, he 
considered, that there should be another Rossetti in 
the field. And I must confess that when I consider 
these utterances and this attitude I am filled with 
as hot and as uncontrollable an anger as I am when 
faced by some more than usually imbecile argument 
against the cause of women's franchise. Yesterday I 
was arguing upon this latter subject with a distin- 
guished ornament of the London Stipendiary Bench. 
Said the police magistrate: "No woman ever admin- 
istered financial interests, ever reigned, or ever fought." 
I mentioned with a quite feigned humility, and with 
apologies for the antiquated nature of my illustra- 
tions, the prioresses and mothers superior who, with 
never questioned financial abilities, had administered 

6i 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

and do administer the innumerable convents, schools, 
almshouses, hospitals, and penitentiaries of Catholic 
Christendom. His Worship mentioned with a snigger 

Soeur C , of Paris, who obtained fraudulent credit 

from jewellers in order to support almshouses. 
Thus with one sneer and the mention of a lady who 

was not a nun at all Mr. considered himself to 

have demolished the claims to consideration of all 
Catholic womanhood. I said that his argument 
reminded me of a Park orator whom I remembered 
claiming to demolish the whole historical and social 
record of the Church of England by citing the name 
of one Herring, a sham clergyman who had extorted 
contributions from the charitable in favor of a fraud- 
ulent almshouse, and I mentioned Joan of Arc. 
The legal luminary remarked that he never had liked 
her, and when I produced Queen Elizabeth and 
Queen Victoria as arguments in favor of the fact 
that a country might enormously extend its bounds 
and enormously flourish while a queen reigned, my 
superior interlocutor remarked that Victoria was a 
horrid old woman, and that Elizabeth ought to have 
been a man. 

I do not say that my friend's methods of argument 
made me angry, since they gave me the chance of 
roasting him alive before an able and distinguished 
assembly; but I could not help being reminded by 
him of Mr. Ruskin's attitude toward Christina 
Rossetti. It was the same fine superiority as made 

62 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 

the police magistrate embrace St. Catharine of Siena, 
Joan of Arc, and Queen Elizabeth in one common 
sneer. But, after all. Queen Elizabeth and the other 
two could look after themselves. Did not one St. 
Catharine confute forty thousand doctors, among 
whom were nine hundred and sixty police magis- 
trates, and did she not in heaven decide the ticklish 
case as to whether penguins, when they had been 
baptized, must be considered to possess souls ^ 

But Christina Rossetti's was a figure so tragic, so 
sympathetic, and, let me emphasize it, so modern, 
that I could wish for any one who put obstacles in her 
way — and there were several — that fate which was 
adjudged the most terrible of all, that a millstone 
should be set about his neck and that he should be 
cast into the deep sea. And, indeed, it would seem 
that Mr. Ruskin had fallen into a deep, a very deep, a 
bottomless sea of oblivion with, around his neck, all 
his heavy volumes for a millstone. (I am at this 
moment corrected in this exaggerated statement, for 
I am informed that you will always find Sesame and 
Lilies in every library catalogue.) And, indeed, I 
am no doubt unduly hard upon Mr. Ruskin, little 
though his eloquent ghost may mind it. For the fact 
is that Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites whom he 
heralded so splendidly and so picturesquely survived 
— that these men marked the close of an era. Ruskin 
was engaged in setting the seal on a pot. Christina 
Rossetti was, if not a genie in the form of a cloud of 

63 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

smoke, at least a subtle essence that was bound not 
only to escape his embalming, but to survive him. 

Ruskin pooh-poohed her because she was not im- 
portant. And I fancy he disliked her intuitively be- 
cause importance was the last thing in this world that 
she would have desired. I remember informing her 
shortly after the death of Lord Tennyson that there 
was a very strong movement, or at any rate a very 
strong feeling abroad, that the Laureateship should be 
conferred upon her. She shuddered. And I think 
that she gave evidence then to as strong an emotion as 
I ever knew in her. The idea of such a position of 
eminence filled her with real horror. She wanted to 
be obscure, and to be an obscure handmaiden of the 
Lord, as fervently as she desired to be exactly correct 
in her language. Exaggerations really pained her. I 
remember that when I told her that I had met hun- 
dreds of people who thought the appointment would 
be most appropriate, she pinned me down until she 
had extracted from me the confession that not more 
than nine persons had spoken to me on the subject. 
And a letter of hers which I possess, acknowledging 
the receipt of my first book, begins: "My dear young 
relation (if you will permit me to style you so, though 
I am aware that I should write more justly 'connec- 
tion.' Yet you are now too old for me to call you 
'Fordie') . . ." 

And there we have one symptom of the gulf that 
separated Christina Rossetti as a Modernist from 

64 




JOHN RUSKIN 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 

Ruskin and the old Pre-Raphaelite Circle. The very 
last thing that these, the last of the Romanticists, de- 
sired was precision. On one page of one of Mr. 
Ruskin's books I have counted the epithet "^golden" 
six times. There are "golden days," "golden- 
mouthed," "distant golden spire," "golden peaks," 
and "golden sunset/' all of them describing one 
picture by Turner in which the nearest approach to 
gold discernible by a precise eye is a mixture of orange- 
red and madder-brown. His was another method; it 
was the last kick of Romanticism — of that Roman- 
ticism that is now so very dead. 

Pre-Raphaelism in itself was born of Realism^ Rus- 
kin gave it one white wing of moral purpose. The 
^stheticists presented it with another, dyed all the 
colors of the rainbow, from the hues of mediaeval 
tapestries to that of romantic love. Thus it flew 
rather unevenly and came to the ground. The 
first Pre-Raphaelites said that you must paint your 
model exactly as you see it, hair for hair, or leaf-spore 
for leaf-sporeo Mr. Ruskin gave them the added 
canon that the subject they painted must be one of 
moral distinction. You must, in fact, paint life as 
you see it, and yet in such a way as to prove that life 
is an ennobling thing. How one was to do this one 
got no particular directions. Perhaps one might 
have obtained it by living only in the drawing-room of 
Brantwood House, Coniston, when Mr. Ruskin was in 
residence. 

65 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

I do not know that in her drawing-room in the 
gloomy London square Christina Rossetti found Ufe 
in any way ennobhng or inspiring. She must have 
found it, if not exceedingly tragic, at least so full of 
pain as to be almost beyond supporting. Her poetry 
is very full of a desire, of a passionate yearning for 
the country, yet there in box-like rooms she lived, 
her windows brushed by the leaves, her rooms rendered 
dark by the shade of those black-trunked London 
trees that are like a grim mockery of their green-boled 
sisters of the open country. I do not know why she 
should have resided in a London square. There were 
no material circumstances that forced it on her, but 
rather the psychological cravings of her inner life. 
And, again, her poetry is very full of a love, of a desire, 
of a passionate yearning for love. Yet there in her 
cloistral seclusion she lived alone in pain, practising 
acts of charity and piety, and seeking almost as 
remorselessly as did Flaubert himself, and just as 
solitarily, for correct expression — for that, that is to 
say, which was her duty in life. As I have pointed 
out elsewhere, this black-robed figure, with eyes 
rendered large by one of the most painful of diseases 
and suffering always from the knife-stabs of yet two 
other most painful diseases — this black-robed figure, 
with the clear-cut and olive-colored features, the dark 
hair, the restrained and formal gestures, the hands 
always folded in the lap, the head always judicially 
a little on one side, and with the precise enuncia- 

66 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 

tion, this tranquil Religious was undergoing with- 
in herself always a fierce struggle between the pagan 
desire for life, the light of the sun and love, and an 
asceticism that, in its almost more than Calvinistic 
restraint, reached also to a point of frenzy. She put 
love from her with both hands and yearned for it 
unceasingly; she let life pass by and wrote of glowing 
tapestries, of wine and pomegranates; she was think- 
ing always of heaths, the wide sands of the seashore, 
of south walls on which the apricots glow, and she 
lived always of her own free will in the gloom of a 
London square. So that if Christianity have its 
saints and martyrs, I am not certain that she was 
not one of the most distinguished of them. For 
there have been ascetics, but there can have been 
few who could have better enjoyed a higher life of 
the senses. She was at the very opposite end of the 
hagaeological scale from St. Louis Gonzaga, of whom 
it is recorded that he was so chaste that he had 
never raised his eyes to look upon a woman, not even 
upon his mother. Her last harrowing thoughts upon 
her racked deathbed were that she had not sufficiently 
denied herself, that she had not worked sufficiently 
in the olive-garden of the Saviour, that she had 
merited, and without the right of complaint she had 
insured, an eternal damnation. It was a terrible 
thought to go down to Death with, and it has always 
seemed to me to be a condemnation of Christianity 
that it should have let such a fate harass such a woman, 

67 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

just as perhaps it is one of the greatest testimonies 
to the powers of discipHne of Christianity that it 
should have trained up such a woman to such a hfe 
of abnegation, of splendid hterary expression, and of 
meticulous attention to duty. The trouble was, of 
course, that whereas by blood and by nature Christina 
Rossetti was a Catholic, by upbringing and by all 
the influences that were around her she was forced 
into the Protestant communion. Under the influence 
of a wise confessor the morbidities of her self-abnega- 
tion would have been checked, her doubts would have 
been stilled with an authoritative "yes" or "no," 
and though such sins as she may have sinned might 
have led her to consider that she had earned a more or 
less long period of torture in purgatory, she would 
have felt the comfort of the thought that all the 
thousands whom by her work she had sustained in 
religion and comforted in the night — that the prayers 
and conversions of all those thousands would have 
earned for her a remission of her penalties, and great 
bliss and comfort in an ultimate heaven. There are, 
of course, Protestant natures as there are Catholic, 
just as there are those by nature agnostic and those 
by nature believing in every fibre, and heaven is, 
without doubt, wide enough for us all. But Christina 
Rossetti's nature was mediaeval in the sense that it 
cared for little things and for arbitrary arrangements. 
In the same sense it was so very modern. For the 
life of to-day is more and more becoming a life of 

68 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 

little things. We are losing more and more the sense 
of a whole, the feeling of a grand design, of the co- 
ordination of all Nature in one great architectonic 
scheme. We have no longer any time to look out 
for the ultimate design. We have to face such an 
infinite number of little things that we cannot stay to 
arrange them in our minds, or to consider them as 
anything but as accidents, happenings, the mere 
events of the day. And if in outside things we can 
perceive no design, but only the fortuitous materialism 
of a bewildering world, we are thrown more and more 
in upon ourselves for comprehension of that which is 
not understandable, and for analysis of things of the 
spirit. In this way we seem again to be returning to 
the empiricism of the Middle Ages, and in that way, 
too, Christina herself, although she resembled the 
figure of a mediaeval nun, seems also a figure very 
modern among all the romantic generalizers who 
surrounded her, who overwhelmed her, who despised 
and outshouted her. 

For in the nineteenth century men still generalized. 
Empirical religion appeared to be dead, and all the 
functions of life could be treated as manifestations 
of a Whole, ordered according to one school of 
thought or another. Thus, love, according to the 
Pre-Raphaelite canon, was a great but rather sloppy 
passion. Its manifestations would be Paolo and 
Francesca, or Launcelot and Guinevere. It was a 
thing that you swooned about on broad, general lines, 

69 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

your eyes closed, your arms outstretched. It excused 
all sins, it sanctified all purposes, and if you went to 
hell over it you still drifted about among snowflakes 
of fire with your eyes closed and in the arms of the 
object of your passion. For it is impossible to suppose 
that when Rossetti painted his picture of Paolo and 
Francesca in hell, he or any of his admirers thought 
that these two lovers were really suflFering. They 
were not. They were suffering perhaps with the 
malaise of love, which is always an uneasiness, but an 
uneasiness how sweet! And the flakes of flames were 
descending all over the rest of the picture, but they 
did not fall upon Paolo and Francesca. No, the 
lovers were protected by a generalized swooning 
passion that formed, as it were, a moral and very 
eflScient mackintosh all over them. And no doubt 
what D. G. Rossetti and his school thought was that, 
although guilty lovers have to go to hell for the sake 
of the story, they will find hell pleasant enough, 
because the aroma of their passion, the wings of the 
great god of love, and the swooning intensity of it all 
will render them insensible to the inconveniences of 
their lodgings. As much as to say that you do not 
mind the bad cooking of the Brighton Hotel if you are 
having otherwise a good time of it. 

But with its glamour, its swooning, its ecstasies, 
and its all-embracing justification, the Pre-Raphaelite 
view of mediaeval love was a very diff'erent thing 
from real mediaevalism. That was a state of things 

70 



I 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 

much more like our own. Mediaeval people took 
their own individual cases on their own individual 
merits, and guilty love exacted some kind of ret- 
ribution very frequently painful, as often as not 
grotesque. Or sometimes there was not any ret- 
ribution at all — a successful intrigue "came off," 
and became material for a joyous conte. It was 
a matter of individual idiosyncrasies then as it is 
to-day. You got roasted in hell, or an injured husband 
stuck a dagger into you, or you were soundly cudgelled, 
drenched with water, or thrown onto noxious dung- 
heaps, just as nowadays you get horsewhipped, escape 
or do not escape the divorce courts, and do or do not 
get requested to resign from your club. There was 
not then, as there is not now, any protective glamour 
about it. The things happened, hard, direct, and 
without the chance of ignoring them. Dante's lovers 
in hell felt bitter cold, stinging flame, shame, horror, 
despair, and possibly even all the eternity of woe that 
was before them. And all the hard, direct, ferocious, 
and unrelenting spirit of the poet went into the pict- 
ure, as into all his other pictures of mediaeval after-life. 
So it was with the Rossetti who dwelt for so long in 
the same house as Dante Gabriel, writing her poems on 
the corner of the washhand-stand in her bedroom, and 
making no mark at all in the household, while all the 
other great figures spouted and generalized about love 
and the musical glasses in every other room of the 
gloomy and surely glamourous houses that in Blooms- 

71 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

bury the Rossettis successively inhabited. They 
talked and generahzed about life and love, and they 
pursued their romantic images along the lines of least 
resistance. They got into scrapes or they did not, 
they squabbled or they made it up; but they always 
w^orked out a moral theory good enough to justify 
themselves and to impress the rest of the world. 

And that in essence was the note of the Victorian 
great. It did not matter what they did, whether it 
was George Eliot living in what we should call to- 
day "open sin," or Schopenhauer trying to have 
all noises suppressed by law because they interrupted 
his cogitations. No matter what their personal eccen- 
tricities or peccadilloes might be, they were always 
along the lines of the higher morality. I am not saying 
that such figures are not to be found to-day. If you 

will read the works of Mr. you will find the 

attitude of the Victorian Great Man exactly repro- 
duced. For whatever this gentleman may desire to 
do in a moment of impulse or of irritation, or in the 
search for copy or in the quest for health, at once 
he will write a great big book to prove that this, 
his eccentricity, ought, according to the higher morals, 
to be the rule of life for the British middle-classes. 
And there are ten or twenty of such gentlemen 
nowadays occupied in so directing our lives, and 
waxing moderately fat upon the profits of their 
spiritual dictatorships, but they have not anything 
like the ascendancy of their predecessors. We have 

72 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 

not any longer our Ruskins, Carlyles, George Eliots, 
and the rest. We have in consequence very much 
more to w^ork out our special cases for ourselves, and 
we are probably a great deal more honest in conse- 
quence. We either do our duties and have very bad 
times, with good consciences, or we do not do our 
duties and enjoy ourselves with occasional pauses for 
unpleasant reflections. But we look, upon the whole, 
in our little unimportantly individual ways, honestly 
at our special cases. The influence of Jean Jacques 
Rousseau, in fact, is on the wane, and the gentleman 
to-day who left his illegitimate children on the steps 
of a foundling hospital would think himself rather a 
dirty dog, and try to forget the incident. 

And this, as much as her closed bedroom door, 
separated Christina Rossetti from the other artists 
and poets and critics and social reformers that fre- 
quented her father's house. She was not influenced 
by Rousseauism at all. She took her life and her love 
unflinchingly in hand, and how very painfully she 
proceeded along the straight path of duty! 

"Does the road wind up-hill all the way? 
Yea, to the very end. 
Will the day's journey last the whole long day? 
From dawn to night, my friend." 

So writing in her early youth she forecasted her 
life. The record is an insensate one; still, from the 
point of view of the man who said that to make a 

73 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

good job of a given task is the highest thing in life, 
then surely Christina Rossetti achieved the very high- 
est of high things. There is no anchorite who so 
denied himself and no Simeon upon his pillar. 
Of course, if we speak about the uselessness of 
sacrifice. . . . 

In the beginning, even from that point of view, the 
poetess was somewhat badly used. She bestowed her 
affections and became engaged to a poor specimen of 
humanity, one of the seven Pre-Raphaelite brethren, 
and, like herself, a member of the Church of England. 
Shortly after the engagement this gentleman's spiritual 
vicissitudes forced him to become a Roman Catholic. 
Christina put up with the change, though it grieved 
her. She consented to remain engaged to him, for 
was not her father at least nominally Catholic and her 
mother Protestant .'' But no sooner had she adjusted 
herself to the changed conditions than her lover once 
more reverted to Anglicanism. I am not certain how 
many religions he essayed. But certainly there came 
a point when the poetess, whose religion was the main 
point of her life, cried that it was enough. The break- 
ing off of her engagement was a very severe blow and 
tinged her life and work with melancholy. Later 
she became engaged to a very charming man of a 
mild humor, great gifts, a touching absence of mind, 
and much gentleness of spirit. This was Cayley, 
the translator of Homer, and the brother of the great 
mathematician. But Cayley himself offered one very 

74 




CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI 

FROM A PICTURE BY DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 

serious obstacle. He was an agnostic, and, in spite of 
Christina's arguments and remonstrances, he remained 
an agnostic. She found it therefore to be her duty 
not to marry him, and they remained apart to the end 
of their lives. And I think that the correspondence 
of this essentially good and gentle man and this nun- 
like and saintly woman is one of the most touching 
products that we have of human love and abstention. 
As love-letters theirs are all the more touching in 
that no note at all of passion is sounded. The lover 
presents the poetess with the sea -mouse, a spiny 
creature like an iridescent slug, and the poetess writes 
a poem to her mouse and chronicles its fate and for- 
tunes, and they write about the weather and their 
households and all such things — little, quaint, humor- 
ous, and not at all pathetic letters such as might have 
passed between Abelard and Helo'ise if those earlier 
Christians had been gifted with senses of humor, de- 
cency, and renunciation. So that the figure of Chris- 
tina Rossetti remains mediaeval or modern, but always 
nun-like. And, since she suffered nearly always from 
intense physical pain and much isolation, there was 
little wonder that her poems were almost altogether 
introspective — just, indeed, as all modern poetry is al- 
most altogether introspective. I remember being in- 
tensely shocked at reading in the Dictionary of Nation- 
al Biography that Doctor Garnett, himself one of the 
quaintest, most picturesque, and most lovable of the 
later figures of English literary life — that Doctor 
6 75 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

Garnett considered Christina Rossetti's poetry to be 
uniformly morbid. I was so distressed by this dis- 
covery that — though I suppose it was no affair of 
mine — I hurried to the principal librarian's book- 
hidden study in the British Museum, and I remon- 
strated even with some agitation against the epithet 
he had selected. Doctor Garnett, however, was ex- 
ceedingly impenitent. With his amiable and obstinate 
smile and his odd, caressing gestures of the hand, he 
insisted that the word "morbid" as applied to liter- 
ature signified that which was written by a person 
suffering from disease. I insisted that it meant such 
writing as was calculated to disease the mind of the 
reader, but we got no further than the statement of 
our respective opinions several times repeated. Doc- 
tor Garnett, surely the most erudite man as far 
as books were concerned in the world of his day, 
was also a gentleman of strong and unshakable opin- 
ions, apparently of the Tory and High Church, but 
at any rate of the official type. I remember being 
present at an impressive argument between this 
scholar and another member of the Rossetti family. 
It concerned the retention by Great Britain of Egypt, 
and it ran like this: 

Said Mr. R : "My dear Garnett, the retention 

by Great Britain of the Egyptian Territory is a sin and 
a shame, and the sooner we evacuate it the sooner 
our disgrace will come to an end." 

Said Doctor Garnett: "My dear R , but if 

76 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 

we evacuated Egypt we should lose the Empire of 
India." 

Said Mr. R : "My dear Garnett, the retention 

by Great Britain of the Egyptian Territory is a sin 
and a shame, and the sooner we evacuate it the sooner 
our disgrace will come to an end." 

Said Doctor Garnett: "My dear R , but if we 

evacuated Egypt we should lose the Empire of India." 

Said Mr. R : "My dear Garnett, the retention 

by Great Britain ..." 

So this instructive discussion continued for I cannot 
say how long. It reminded me of the problem: 
"What would happen if an irresistible force came 
against an immovable post ?" The words of both 
gentlemen were uttered without any raising of the 
voice or without engendering the least heat. But at 
last one of my cousins ended the discussion by letting 
loose in the room a tame owl, and the conversation 
passed into other channels. 



V 

MUSIC AND MASTERS 

WHEN I was a very small boy indeed I was taken 
to a concert. In those days, as a token of my 
Pre-Raphaelite origin, I wore very long golden hair, 
a suit of greenish-yellow corduroy velveteen with gold 
buttons, and two stockings, of which the one was red 
and the other green. These garments were the curse 
of my young existence and the joy of every street-boy 
who saw me. I was taken to this concert by my 
father's assistant on the Times newspaper, Mr. 
Rudall was the most kindly, the most charming, the 
most gifted, the most unfortunate — and also the most 
absent-minded of men. Thus, when we had arrived 
in our stalls — and in those days the representative of 
the Times always had the two middle front seats — 
when we had arrived in our stalls Mr. Rudall dis- 
covered that he had omitted to put on his necktie 
that day. He at once went out to purchase one and, 
having become engrossed in the selection, he forgot 
all about the concert, went away to the Thatched 
House Club, and passed there the remainder of the 
evening. I was left, in the middle of the front row, 

78 



MUSIC AND MASTERS 

all alone and feeling very tiny and deserted — the sole 
representative of the august organ that in those days 
was known as " The Thunderer." 

Immediately in front of me, standing in the vacant 
space before the platform, which was all draped in 
red, there were three gilt arm-chairs and a gilt table. 
In the hall there was a great and continuing rustle 
of excitement. Then suddenly this became an enor- 
mous sound of applause. It volleyed and rolled round 
and round the immense space; I had never heard 
such sound, and I have never again heard such another. 
Then I perceived that from beneath the shadow of 
the passage that led into the artists' room — in the 
deep shadow — there had appeared a silver head, a 
dark-brown face, hook-nosed, smiling the enigmatic 
Jesuit's smile, the long locks falling backward so that 
the whole shape of the apparition was that of the 
Sphinx head. Behind this figure came two others 
that excited no proportionate attention, but, small 
as I then was, I recognized in them the late King 
and the present Queen Mother, 

They came closer and closer to me; they stood in 
front of the three gilt arm-chairs; the deafening 
applause continued. The old man with the terrible 
enigmatic face made gestures of modesty. He refused, 
smiling all the time, to sit in one of the gilt arm- 
chairs. And suddenly he bowed down upon me. 
He stretched out his hands; he lifted me out of my 
seat, he sat down in it himself and left me standing, 

79 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

the very small, lonely child with the long golden curls, 
underneath all those eyes and stupefied by the immense 
sounds of applause. 

The King sent an equerry to entreat the Master 
to come to his seat; the Master sat firmly planted 
there, smiling obstinately. Then the Queen came 
and took him by the hand. She pulled him — I don't 
know how much strength she needed — right out of 
his seat and — to prevent his returning to it she sat 
down there. After all it was my seat. And then, 
as if she realized my littleness and my loneliness, she 
drew me to her and sat me on her knee. It was a 
gracious act. 

There is a passage in Pepy's Diary in which he 
records that he w^as present at some excavations in 
Westminster Abbey when they came upon the skull of 
Jane Seymour, and he kissed the skull on the place where 
once the lips had been. And in his Diary he records: 
"It was on such and such a day of such and such a 
year that I did kiss a Queen," and then, his feelings 
overcoming him, he repeats: "It was on such and 
such a day of such and such a year that I did kiss a 
Queen." I have forgotten what was the date when I 
sat In a Queen's lap. But I remember very well that 
when I came out into Piccadilly the cabmen, with their 
three-tiered coats, were climbing up the lamp-posts 
and shouting out: "Three cheers for the Habby 
Liszt!" And, indeed, the magnetic personality of 
the Abbe Liszt was incredible in its powers of awaken- 

80 



I 




FRANZ LISZT 



FROM PORTRAIT PAINTED FROM LIFE BY MUNKACSY. THROUGH THE COURTESY OF 
FREDERICK KEPPEL 



MUSIC AND MASTERS 

ing enthusiasm. A few days later my father took me 
to call at the house where Liszt was staying — it was 
at the Lytteltons', I suppose. There were a number 
of people in the drawing-room and they were all 
asking Liszt to play. Liszt steadfastly refused. A 
few days before he had had a slight accident that had 
hurt one of his hands. He refused. Suddenly he 
turned his eyes upon me, and then, bending down, 
he said in my ear: 

"Little boy, I will play for you, so that you will 
be able to tell your children's children that you have 
heard Liszt play." 

And he played the first movement of the "Moon- 
light Sonata." I do not remember much of his playing, 
but I remember very well that I was looking, while 
Liszt played, at a stalwart, florid Englishman who is 
now an earl. And suddenly I perceived that tears 
were rolling down his cheeks. And soon all the 
room was in tears. It struck me as odd that people 
should cry because Liszt was playing the "Moonlight 
Sonata." 

Ah! that wonderful personality; there was no end 
to the enthusiasms it aroused. I had a distant con- 
nection — oddly enough an English one — who became 
by marriage a lady-in-waiting at the court of Saxe- 
Weimar. I met her a few years ago, and she struck 
me as a typically English and unemotional personage. 
But she had always about her a disagreeable odor 
that persisted to the day of her death. When they 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

came to lay her out they discovered that round her 
neck she wore a sachet, and in that sachet there was 
the half of a cigar that had been smoked by Liszt. 
Liszt had lunched with her and her husband thirty 
years before. 

And ah! the records of musical enthusiasms! 
How dead they are and how mournful is the reading 
of them! How splendid it is to read how the students 
of Trinity College, Dublin, took the horses out of 
Malibran's carriage and, having amid torchlight 
drawn her round and round the city, they upset the 
carriage in the quadrangle and burnt it to show their 
joy. They also broke six hundred and eighty windows. 
The passage in the life of Malibran always reminds 
me of a touching sentence in Carlyle's Diary: 

"To-day on going out I observed that the men at 
the corner were more than usually drunk. And then 
I remembered that it was the birthday of their Re- 
deemer." 

But what has become of all the once-glorious ones ? 
When I was a boy at Malvern my grandfather went 
about in a Bath-chair because he was suffering from 
a bad attack of gout. Sometimes beside his chair 
another would be pulled along. It contained a little 
old lady with a faint and piping voice. That was 
Jenny Lind. 

I wonder how many young persons of twenty-five 
to-day have even heard the name of Jenny Lind .? 
And this oblivion has always seemed to me unjust. 

82 



MUSIC AND MASTERS 

But perhaps Providence is not so unjust after all. 
Sometimes, when I am thinking of this subject, I 
have a vision. I see, golden and far way, an island 
of the Hesperides — somewhere that side of heaven. 
And in this island there is such an opera-house as 
never was. And in this opera-house music is for- 
ever sounding forth, and all these singers are all 
singing together — Malibran and Jenny Lind and 
Schlehi, and even Carolina Bauer. And Mario stands 
in the wings smoking his immense cigar and waiting 
for his time to go on. And beside him stands Cam- 
panini. And every two minutes the conductor stops 
the orchestra so that twenty bouquets, each as large 
as a mountain, may be handed over the footlights to 
each of the performers. 

The manifestation of the most virtuous triumph 
that was ever vouchsafed me to witness occurred 
when I was quite a child. A prima donna W3.s calling 
upon my father. She had been lately touring round 
America as one of the trainloads of prime donne that 
Colonel Mapleson was accustomed to take about 
with him. Mme. B. was a dark and fiery lady, and 
she related her triumphant story somewhat as follows: 

**My best part it is Dinorah — my equal in the 
* Shadow Song' there is not. Now what does Colonel 
Mapleson do but give this part of Dinorah to Mme. C. 
Is it not a shame ? Is it not a disgrace .? She cannot 
sing, she cannot sing for nuts, and she was announced 
to appear in 'Dinorah' for the whole of the tour. 

83 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

The first time she was to sing it was in Chicago, and 
I say to myself: 'Ah! only wait, you viper, that has 
stolen the part for which the good God created me!' 
Mme. C, she is a viper! I tell you so. I, Eularia B.! 
But I say she shall not sing in ' Dinorah.' You know 
the parrots of Mme. C. Ugly beasts, they are the 
whole world for her. If one of them is indisposed 
she cannot sing — not one note. Now the grace of 
God comes in. On the very night when she was to 
sing in 'Dinorah' in Chicago I passed the open door 
of her room in the hotel; and God sent at the same 
moment a waiter who was carrying a platter of ham 
upon which were many sprigs of parsley. So by the 
intercession of the blessed saints it comes into my 
head that parsley is death to parrots. I seize the 
platter from the waiter" — and Mme. B.'s voice and 
manner became those of an august and avenging deity 
— "I seize the platter, I tear from it the parsley, I 
rush into the room of Mme. C. By the grace of God 
Mme. C. is absent, and I throw the parsley to the ugly 
green fowls. They devour it with voracity, and they 
die; they all die. Mme. C. has fits for a fortnight, 
and I — I sing Dinorah. I sing it like a miracle; 
I sing it like an angel, and Mme. C. has never the 
face to put her nose on the stage in that part again. 
Never!" 

This was perhaps the mildest of the stories of the 
epic jealousies of musicians with which my father's 
house re-echoed, but it is the one which remains most 

84 



MUSIC AND MASTERS 

vividly in my mind, I suppose because of the poor 
parrots. 

It was the dread of these acrid jealousies that even- 
tually drove from my mind all hope of a career as a 
composer. There was something so harsh in some of 
the manifestations that met me, I being at the time 
an innocent and gentle boy, that I am filled with won- 
der when I consider that any composer ever has the 
strength of mind to continue in his avocation or that 
any executant ever struggles through as far as the 
concert platform. At the last public school which I 
attended — for my attendances at schools were varied 
and singular, according as my father ruined himself 
with starting new periodicals or happened to be flush 
of money on account of new legacies — at my last 
public school I was permitted to withdraw myself 
every afternoon to attend concerts. This brought 
down upon me the jeers of one particular Ger- 
man master who kept order in the afternoons, and 
upon one occasion he set for translation the sen- 
tence : 

"While I was idling away my time at a concert 
the rest of my classmates were diligently engaged in 
the study of the German language." 

Proceeding mechanically with the translation — for I 

paid no particular attention to Mr. P , because 

my father, in his reasonable tones, had always 
taught me that schoolmasters were men of inferior 
intelligence to whom personally we should pay lit- 

85 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

tie attention, though the rules for which they stood 
must be exactly observed — I had got as far as 
*'Indem ich faulenzte ..." when it suddenly 
occurred to me that Mr. P , in setting this sen- 
tence to the class, was aiming a direct insult not 
only at myself, but at Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, 
Wagner, and Robert Franz. An extraordinary and 
now inexplicable fury overcame me. At all my 
schools I was always the good boy of my respective 
classes, but on this occasion I rose in my seat, 
propelled by an irresistible force, and I addressed 

Mr. P with words the most insulting and the 

most contemptuous. I pointed out that music was 
the most divine of all arts; that German was a 
language fit only for horses; that German literature 
contained nothing that any sensible person could want 
to read except the works of Schopenhauer, who was 
an Anglomaniac, and in any case was much better 
read in an English translation; I pointed out that 
Victor Hugo has said that to alter the lowest type of 
inanities, "il faut etre stupide comme un maitre 
d'ecole qui n'est bon a rien que pour planter des 
choux." I can still feel the extraordinary indignation 
that filled me, though I have to make an effort of the 
imagination to understand why I was so excited; I 
can still feel the way the breath poured through my 
distended nostrils. With, I suppose, some idea of 
respect for discipline, I had carefully spoken in 
German, which none of my classmates understood. 

86 



MUSIC AND MASTERS 

My harangue was suddenly ended by Mr. P 's 

throwing his large inkpot at me; it struck me upon the 

shoulder and ruined my second-best coat and waistcoat. 

I thought really no more of the incident. Mr. 

P was an excellent man, with a red face, a 

bald head, golden side-whiskers and an apoplectic 
build of body. Endowed by nature with a temper 
more than volcanic, it was not unusual for him to 
throw an inkpot at a boy who made an exasperating 
mistranslation, but he had never before hit anybody; 
so that meeting him afterward in the corridors I 
apologized profusely to him. He apologized almost 
more profusely to me, and we walked home together, 
our routes from school being exactly similar. I had 
the greatest difficulty in preventing his buying me a 
new suit of clothes, while with a gentle reproach- 
fulness he reproved me for having uttered blas- 
phemies against the language of Goethe, Schiller, 
Lessing, and Jean Paul Richter. It was then toward 
the end of the term, and shortly afterward the head- 
master sent for me and informed me that I had better 
not return to the school. He said — and it was cer- 
tainly the case — that it was one of the founder's rules 
that no boy engaged in business could be permitted 
to remain. This rule was intended to guard against 
gambling and petty huckstering among the boys. But 
Mr. K said that he understood I had lately pub- 
lished a book and had received for it not only publicity 
but payment, the payment being against the rules of 

87 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

the school, and the pubHcity calculated to detract 
from a strict spirit of discipline. Mr. K was ex- 
ceedingly nice and sympathetic, and he remarked 
that in his day my uncle Oliver Madox Brown had 
had the reputation of being the laziest boy at that 
establishment, while I had amply carried on that 
splendid tradition. 

That was the last of my school days, but nearly 
fifteen years later I met in the Strand a man who was 
an officer in the Burmese Civil Service. At school he 
had been my particular chum. And he told me that 

he had been so shocked by Mr. P 's throwing the 

inkpot at me that, without telling anybody about it, 
he had gone straight to the headmaster and had 
reported the whole matter. The headmaster had 

taken Mr. P to task to such effect that the poor 

man resigned from the school, and shortly afterward 
died in Alsace - Lorraine. Apparently the offence 
of my having written a book was only a pretext 

for getting rid of me from the school. Mr. P , it 

appears, had reported that my powers of invective 
were so considerable that I must gravely menace the 
authority of any master. And yet, from that day to 
this, and never before, can I remember having ad- 
dressed a cutting speech to any living soul except 
once to a German waiter in the refreshment-room of 
Frankfort Hauptbahnhof. 

Thus music, or the enthusiasm for music, put an end 
to my lay education in these islands, and I entered 

88 



MUSIC AND MASTERS 

upon a course more distinctly musical. Having 
received instruction from more or less sound musi- 
cians, and a certain amount of encouragement from 
musicians more or less eminent, I attempted the 
entrance examination of one of the British royal 
institutions for education in music. I acquitted 
myself reasonably well, or even exceedingly well, as 
far as the theory of music was concerned, but this 
institution has, or perhaps it was only that it had, a 
rule that seemed to me inscrutable in its stupidity. 
Every pupil must take what is called a second study 
— the study of some instrument or other. I had a 
nodding acquaintance with practically every instru- 
ment of the orchestra, except the drums, which I 
could never begin to tackle. The principal of the 
institution in question set it down to my dismay that 
my second study must be the piano. Now I could not 
play the piano; I dislike the piano, which seems to me 
to be the most soulless of the instruments, and in any 
case to acquire mastery of the piano, or, indeed, of any 
other instrument, requires many hours of practising a 
day, which would interfere, as it seemed to me, rather 
seriously with the deep study that I hoped to make of 
the theory of music. I accordingly asked to be 
allowed to interview the principal — an awful being 
who kept himself splendidly remote. Having suc- 
ceeded with a great deal of difficulty in penetrating 
into his room, I discovered a silent gentleman who 
listened to my remarks without any appearance of 

89 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

paying attention to them. But when I had finished 
and was waiting in nervous silence, he suddenly 
overwhelmed me with a torrent of excited language. 
What it amounted to was that during his lifetime 
my father had domineered over that institution, and 
that if I thought I was going to keep up the tradition 
I was exceedingly mistaken. On the contrary, the 
professors were determined to give me a hot time of it 

or, as Sir C D put it, to treat me with the 

utmost rigor of the rules. 

This gave me food for several days of reflection. I 

had to consider that Sir C D was, in private 

life, an unemotional English gentleman, frigid and 
rather meticulous in the matter of good form. 
Musical emotion had worked such a person up to a 
pitch of passion so egregious as was manifested in all 
his features; musical passion had worked me up to 
such a pitch of emotion as to let me insult in the 
most outrageous manner a harmless person like Mr, 

P , whom I really liked. There must be then 

something so unbalancing in a musical career as to 
leave me very little opening, I being, at any rate in 
my own conception, a person singularly shy and 
wanting in the faculty which is called **push.'* 

I had to remember, too, that my best friends — the 
young men and women with whom personally I got 
on in the extreme of geniality — became invariably 
frigid and monosyllabic as soon as I mentioned 
my musical ambitions. There was about these 

90 



MUSIC AND MASTERS 

people on such occasions an air of reserve, an air 
almost of deafness; whereas, when they spoke of 
their own ambitions they became animated, gay, enthu- 
siastic. This might be evidence that all musicians 
were hopelessly self-centred, or it might be evidence 
that my music was no good at all. I dare say both 
were true. Whether it were both or either it seemed to 
me that here was no career for a person craving the 
sympathy of enthusiasm and the contagious encour- 
agement of applause. Possibly had I lived in Germany 
it would have been different, for in Germany there is 
musical life, a musical atmosphere. In the German 
establishments for musical education there is none of 
this deafness, there is none of this reserve, there is 
none of this self-centred abstraction. There is a busy, 
there is a contagious life, and student keeps watch on 
student with an extreme anxiety which may be evi- 
dence of no more than a determination to know what 
the other fellow is doing and to go one better. 

In England, at any rate in the musical world as in 
the world of all the other arts, a general change seems 
gradually to have come over the atmosphere in the 
last quarter of a century. Jealousies among execu- 
tants, among composers, have diminished; and along 
with them have diminished the enthusiasm and the 
partisanships of the public. In the fifties and sixties 
there was an extraordinary outcry against the Pre- 
Raphaelite movement, in the seventies and eighties 
there was an outcry almost more extraordinary against 
7 91 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

what was called the Music of the Future. As I have 
said elsewhere, Charles Dickens attempted to get the 
authorities to imprison the Pre-Raphaelite painters 
because he considered that their works were blas- 
phemous. And he was backed by a whole, great body 
of public opinion. In the seventies and eighties there 
were cries for the imprisonment alike of the critics 
who upheld and the artistes who performed the Music 
of the Future. The compositions of Wagner were 
denounced as being atheistic, sexually immoral, and 
tending to further socialism and the throwing of 
bombs. Wagnerites were threatened with assassina- 
tion, and assaults between critics of the rival schools 
were things not unknown in the foyer of the opera. 
I really believe that my father, as the chief ex- 
ponent of Wagner in these islands, did go in some 
personal danger. Extraordinary pressures were 
brought to bear upon the more prominent critics of the 
day, the pressure coming, as a rule, from the ex- 
ponents of the school of Italian opera. Thus, at the 
openings of the opera seasons packing-cases of large 
dimensions and considerable in number would arrive 
at the house of the ferocious critic of the chief news- 
paper of England. They would contain singular 
assortments of comestibles and of objects of art. 
Thus I remember half a dozen hams, the special 
product of some north Italian town; six cases of 
Rhine wine, which were no doubt intended to pro- 
pitiate the malignant Teuton; a reproduction of the 

92 



MUSIC AND MAST ERS 

Medici Venus in marble, painted with phosphoric 
paint, so that it gleamed blue and ghostly in the 
twilight; a case of Bohemian glass, and several 
strings of Italian sausage. And these packing- 
cases, containing no outward sign of their senders, 
would have to be unpacked and then once more 
repacked, leaving the servants with fingers damaged 
by nails, and passages littered with straw. Inside 
would be found the cards of Italian prime donne^ 
tenors or basses, newly arrived in London, and send- 
ing servile homage to the illustrious critic of the 
"Giornale Times." On one occasion a letter contain- 
ing bank-notes for ;^50 arrived from a prima donna 
with a pathetic note begging the critic to absent himself 
from her first night. Praise from a Wagnerite she con- 
sidered to be impossible, but she was ready to pay for 
silence. I do not know whether this letter inspired my 
father with the idea of writing to the next suppliant 
that he was ready to accept her present — it was the 
case of Bohemian glass — but that in that case he would 
never write a word about her singing. He meant the 
letter, of course, as a somewhat clumsy joke, but the 
lady — she was not, however, an Italian — possessing a 
sense of humor, at once accepted the offer. This put 
my father rather in a quandary, for Madame H. 
was one of the greatest exponents of emotional tragic 
music that there had ever been, and the occasion on 
which she was to appear was the first performance in 
England of one of the great operas of the world. I 

93 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

do not exactly know whether my father went through 
any conscientious troubles — I presume he did, for he 
was a man of a singular moral niceness. At any rate 
he wrote an enthusiastic notice of the opera and an 
enthusiastic and deserved notice of the impersonatrix 
of Carmen. And since the Bohemian glass — or the 
poor remains of the breakages of a quarter of a century 
— still decorate my sideboard, I presume that he 
accepted the present. I do not really see what else 
he could have done. 

Pressure of other sorts was also not unknown. 
Thus, there was an opera produced by a foreign 
baron who was a distinguished figure in the diplo- 
matic service, and who was very well looked on at 
Court. In the middle of the performance my father 
received a command to go into the royal box, where a 
royal personage informed him that in his august 
opinion the work was one of genius. My father 
replied that he was sorry to differ from so distinguished 
a connoisseur, but that, in his opinion, the music was 
absolute rubbish — ^'Lauter Klatsch." The reply was 
undiplomatic and upon the whole regrettable, but my 
father had been irritated by the fact that a good deal 
of Court pressure had already been brought to bear 
upon him. I believe that there were diplomatic 
reasons for desiring to flatter the composer of the 
opera, who was attached to a foreign embassy — the 
embassy of the nation with whom, for the moment, 
the diplomatic relations of Great Britain were some- 

94 



MUSIC AND MASTERS 

what strained. So that, without doubt, His Royal 
Highness was as patriotically in the right as my father 
was in a musical sense. Eventually the notice of the 
opera was written by another hand. The performance 
of this particular opera remains in my mind because, 
during one of its scenes, which represented the frozen 
circle of hell, the cotton-wool, which figured as snow 
on the stage, caught fire and began to burn. An in- 
cipient panic took place among the audience, but the 
orchestra, under a firm composer whose name I have 
unfortunately forgotten, continued to play, and the 
flames were extinguished by one of the singers using 
his cloak. But I still remember being in the back of 
the box and seeing in the foreground, silhouetted 
against the lights of the stage, the figures of my father 
and of some one else — I think it was William Rossetti 
— standing up and shouting down into the stalls: 
*' Sit down, brutes! Sit down, cowards!" 

On the other hand, it is not to be imagined that acts 
of kindness and good-fellowship were rare under this 
seething mass of passions and of jealousies. Thus 
at one of the Three Choir Festivals, my father, having 
had the misfortune to sprain his ankle, was unable to 
be present in the cathedral. His notice was written 
for him by the critic of the paper which was most 
violently opposed to views at all Wagnerian — a gen- 
tleman whom, till that moment, my father regarded as 
his bitterest personal enemy. This critic happened 
to be staying in the same hotel, and, having heard of 

95 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

the accident, volunteered to write the notice out of 
sheer good feeling This gentleman, an extreme bon 
vivant and a man of an excellent and versatile talent, 
has since told me that he gave himself particular 
trouble to imitate my father's slightly cumbrous Ger- 
manic English and his extreme modernist views. 
This service was afterward repaid by my father in the 
following circumstances. It was again one of the 
Three Choir Festivals — at Worcester, I think, and we 
were stopping at Malvern — my father and Mr. S. 
going in every day to the cathedral city. Mr. S. was 
either staying with us or in an adjoining house, and on 
one Wednesday evening, his appetite being sharpened 
by an unduly protracted performance of "The 
Messiah," Mr. S. partook so freely of the pleasures 
of the table that he omitted altogether to write his 
notice. This fact he remembered just before the 
closing of the small local telegraph office, and, although 
Mr. S. was by no means in a condition to write his 
notice, he was yet sufficiently mellow with wine to be 
lachrymose and overwhelmed at the idea of losing his 
post. We rushed off at once to the telegraph office 
and did what we could to induce the officials to 
keep the wires open while the notice was being written. 
But all inducements failed. My father hit upon a 
stratagem at the last moment. At that date it was a 
rule of the post-office that if the beginning of a long 
message were handed in before eight o'clock the office 
must be kept open until its conclusion as long as 

96 



MUSIC AND MASTERS 

there was no break in the handing in of shps. My 
father therefore commanded me to telegraph any- 
thing that I hked to the newspaper office as long as 
I kept it up while he was writing the notice of "The 
Messiah." And the only thing that came into my 
head at the moment was the church service. The 
newspaper was therefore astonished to receive a long 
telegram beginning: ''^ When the wicked man turneth 
away from the sin that he has committed" and con- 
tinuing through the " Te Deum " and the " Nunc 
Dimittis," till suddenly it arrived at "The Three 
Choirs Festival. Worcester, Wednesday, July 27th, 
1 1887." 

j Nowadays the acts of kindliness no doubt remain a 
I feature of the musical world, but I think the enthu- 
i siasms as well as the ferocities have diminished alto- 
; gether. Composers like Strauss and Debussy steal 
upon us as it were in the night. Yet both Strauss and 
I Debussy must be nearly as incomprehensible to good 
j Wagnerites as were the works of Wagner to enthu- 
: siastic followers of Rossini and the early Verdi. Yet 
I there are no outcries; there is no clamoring for the 
j instant imprisonment of Strauss or the critic of the 

I . Nor is this want of enthusiasm limited to 

England. A little time ago I was present at the first 
performance in Paris of Strauss's "Also sprach 
Zarathustra." The hall was filled with "All Paris" — 
all Paris, polite, indifferent, blagueur, anxious to be 
present at anything that was new, foreign, and exotic. 

97 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

There was a respectable amount of applause, there 
was some yawning decently concealed. In the middle 
of it the old gentleman who had taken me to the 
performance got up suddenly and made for the door. 
He had, as I heard, some altercation with the attend- 
ants, for there was a rule that the doors could not be 
opened while the music played. I followed him to the 
door and found my friend — the late General du 

T , one of the veterans of the war of 1870 — 

explaining to the attendant that he felt himself gravely 
indisposed and that he must positively be allowed to 
go away. We were at last permitted to go out. Out- 
side, the General said that Strauss's music really 
had made him positively ill. And it had made him still 
more ill to have it received with applause. He wanted 
to know what had happened to France — what had 
happened to Paris, to that Paris which, in the seven- 
ties, had resisted by force of arms the production of 
"Tannhauser" at the Opera. The music appeared 
to him horrible, unbearable, and yet no one had 
protested. 

I could not help asking him why he had been present 
at all, and he said, with an air of fine reason: 

"Well, we move in modern times. I still think it 
was wrong to produce Wagner at the Opera so soon 
after the war. It was unpatriotic, it was to take 
revenge in the wrong direction. But I have had time 
enough, my friend, to become reconciled to the music 
of Wagner as music. And I thought to myself, now 

98 



MUSIC AND MASTERS 

here is a new German composer; I will not again 
make the mistake of violently abusing his music 
before I have heard a note of it. For the music of 
Wagner I abused violently before I had heard a note 
of it." 

The General went on to say that this new music 
was worse than nonsense; it was an outrage. The 
high, discordant notes gripped the entrails and gave 
one colic. 

"Nevertheless," he said, "you will see that no critic 
says a word against this music. They are all afraid. 
They all fear to make themselves appear as foolish 
as did the critics who opposed the school of Wagner." 

And, upon the whole, I am inclined to think that 
the General was right. The other day I attended a con- 
cert consisting mainly of the Song Cycles of Debussy, 
setting the words of Verlaine. They were sung by an 
Armenian lady who had escaped from a Turkish 
harem, and had had no musical training. She was 
a barbaric creature who uttered loud howls, and the 
effect was to me disagreeable in the extreme; all the 
same the audience was large and enthusiastic, and 
the most enlightened organ of musical opinion of 
to-day spoke of the performance with a chastened 
enthusiasm. I happened to meet the writer of the 
notice in the course of the following afternoon and I 
asked him what he really got for himself out of that 
singular collocation of sounds. He said airily: "Well, 
you see, one gets emotions!" 

99 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

I said: "Good God! what sort of emotions ?" 

He answered: "Well, you see, if one shuts one's eyes 
one can imagine that one is eating strawberry jam 
and oysters in a house of ill-fame and a cat is rushing 
violently up and down the keyboard of the piano with 
a cracker tied to its tail." 

I said: "Then why in the world didn't you say so 
in your notice ?" 

He smiled blandly: "Well, you see, an ignorant 
public might take such a description for abuse, and 
we cannot afford to abuse anything now." 

I said: "You mean that you're still frightened of 
Wagner?" 

"Oh, we're all most frightened of Wagner," he 
answered, "and it's not only that. The business 
managers of our newspapers won't let us abuse any- 
thing, or the papers would never get any more concert 
advertisements." 

I fancy that this last statement was in the way of 
pulling my leg, for as a matter of fact there is only one 
newspaper in London that has any concert advertise- 
ments worth speaking of, and this was not the paper 
that my friend represented. The remark would, how- 
ever, have been true enough of the reviewers of books, 
for, owing to the dread of losing publishers' advertise- 
ments, there is practically no paper — or there is prac- 
tically only one paper — in London that will insert an 
unfriendly review. Personally, being a writer of 
exclusive tastes or of a jealous temperament, I am 

100 



MUSIC AND MASTERS 

never permitted to review a book at all. Going, 
however, the other day into the house of a friend who 
reviews books for one of our leading organs, I per- 
ceived upon a table the book of a much-boomed 
author who appeared to me to be exceedingly nau- 
seous. I said: 

"Do, for goodness' sake, let me save you the trouble 
of noticing that work." 

And it was placed in my hand. I wrote a column 
! of fairly moderate criticism; I extinguished the book, 
I murdered the author with little stilettoes. The 
notice was never printed, though my friend, the 
i reviewer, duly received her check for one column, 
' £i ijs. 6d., which, I presume, was the price of 
] silence. 

' And there in a nutshell the whole matter is. The 

I ferocity of the critics for one reason or another has 

( come to an end. The eccentricities of the artists are 

I curbed, the enthusiasms of the public are dead. I 

do not know where we should have to go nowadays 

i to find the cozy musical enthusiasms that subsisted 

into the eighties and nineties. Where now shall we 

find the performers of the old Monday "Pops".? 

I Where now shall we find the old little family party 

j that the audience was ? We used to pay a shilling 

\ and we used to go in through passages that resembled 

rats' holes, in the back of the old St. James's Hall. 

We used to sit in the semicircle of hard wooden seats 

that held the orchestra on symphony days. But these 

lOI 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

i 

were quartet concerts. There was Joachim, with | 
the leonine, earnest head. There was Piatti, with 
a gray, grizzled, shaggy hair and beard, so that his 
head seemed exactly to reproduce the lines of the 
head of his violoncello. There was Ries, with broad, 
honest, blond Teutonic features; there was Strauss, it 
with the head of a little, bald old mole, with golden fl 
spectacles and a myopic air. Joachim would take a 
glance round the hall, having his violin resting already 11 
upon a handkerchief upon his chest beneath his chin. 
He would make a little flourish with his bow like the 
conductor at an orchestra, the other three sitting 
silent, intent, caught up away from the world. Joachim 
would lay his bow upon the strings; the sounds of 
the opening notes of the quartet would steal into 
the air and, engrossed all round the orchestra, we 
would follow the music in the little, miniature scores 
with the tiny notes — first subject, second subject, 
working out, free phantasia, recapitulation. We 
should be almost as intent as the performers and we 
should know each other — all of the audience — almost 
as well. You could not doubt the excellence of the 
music or the fellowship; there would never be a 
wrong note, just as there would never be a moment's 
lapse in our attention. 

When these concerts were over it was sometimes 
my privilege to walk home along with Joachim and 
to carry his almost too precious violin. Almost too 
precious, since it made the privilege so very nervous 

102 




JOSEPH JOACHIM 



MUSIC AND MASTERS 

an honor. And I remember that on one occasion 
somewhere in a by-street we came upon an old bHnd 
fiddler playing a violin whose body was formed of a 
corned-meat tin. Joachim stood for some minutes 
regarding the old man, then suddenly he took the 
violin into his own hands and, having dusted it, asked 
me to produce his own bow from his own case. He 
stood for some little time playing a passage from the 
" Trillo del Diabolo of Tartini," looking as intent, as 
earnest, and as abstracted there in the empty street as 
he was accustomed to do upon the public platform. 
After a time he restored the instrument to the old 
fiddler along with a shilling and we pursued our way. 
Any executant of a personality more florid would have 
conducted the old blind fiddler into a main road, 
would have passed round the hat himself, would have 
crumpled into it several bank-notes, and would with- 
out doubt have had the aff^air reported in the news- 
papers. I saw, indeed, only yesterday such a feat 
reported of a celebrated advertising 'cellist. Joachim, 
however, merely wanted to know how an instrument 
with a metal belly would sound if it were properly 
played, and, having the information, since it seemed 
to him to be worth one shilling, he paid a shilling for it. 
I do not know where we could go nowadays to recap- 
ture that spirit of earnestness. On the other hand, I 
do not know where I should go to find a prima donna 
who would boast of having administered parsley to 
another's parrot. And of one thing I am fairly con- 

103 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

fident — if practically none of us any more get very 
excited about rival schools of music, very few of us 
at social functions talk quite so loudly as used to be 
the case in the days of Cimabue Brown, and the 
Punch of Mr. du Maurier. We talk, of course, and 
we talk all the time, but we talk in much lower voices. 
We find that music agreeably accompanies conversa- 
tion as long as we do not try to outshout the instru- 
ments. We find, indeed, that music is so stimulating 
to our ideas that, whereas small talk may come 
exceedingly difficult to us at any other time, there 
is nothing that so makes irresistibly interesting topics 
bubble up in the mind as a pianissimo movement 
in the strings. Waiting impatiently, therefore, for a 
passage in louder tones, we commence avidly our 
furtive and whispered conversation, which continues 
till the last note of the selection. And this last note 
leaves us conveniently high and dry with a feeling of 
nakedness and of abashment. Thus, indeed, music 
has come into its own. If it be less of an art it has a 
greater utility. It has helped the Englishman to talk. 
A few years ago one might drearily have imagined 
that that was impossible. 

The other day I was at a wedding reception; there 
was a very large crowd. In one corner an excellent 
quintet discussed selections from the "Contes d'Hof- 
mann." We were all talking twenty to the dozen. 
My vis-a-vis was telling me something that did not 
interest me, when the voice of a man behind me said: 

104 



MUSIC AND MASTERS 

" So they left him there in prison with a broken bottle 
of poison in his pocket." And then the music stopped 
suddenly and I never heard who the man was or what 
he had done to get into prison or why he had broken 
the bottle of poison. 



VI 

PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRISONS 

WHEN I was a little boy there still attached 
something of the priestly to all the functionaries 
of the Fine Arts or the humaner Letters. To be a 
poet like Mr. Swinburne or like Mr. Rossetti, or 
even like Mr. Arthur O'Shaughnessy, had about it 
something tremendous, something rather awful. If 
Mr. Swinburne was in the house we children knew 
of it up in the nursery. A hush communicated 
itself to the entire establishment. The scullery 
maid, whose name I remember was Nelly; the 
cook, whose name was Sophy; the housemaid, who 
was probably Louie, or it may have been Lizzie, 
and the nurse, who was certainly Mrs. Atterbury — 
she had seen more murders and more gory occurrences 
than any person I have ever since met — even the 
tremendous governess, who was known as Miss Hall, 
though that was not her name, and who had attached 
to her some strange romance such as that she was 
wooed too persistently by a foreign count with a name 
like Pozzo di Borgo — thouijh that was not the name — 
we all of us, all the inhabitants of the back nooks and 

1 06 



PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRISONS 

crannies of a large stucco house, fell to talking in 
whispers. I used to be perfectly convinced that the 
ceiling would fall in if I raised my voice in the very 
slightest. This excitement, this agitation, these 
tremulous undertones would become exaggerated if 
the visitor was the editor of the Times, Richard 
Wagner, or Robert Franz, a composer whom we were 
all taught especially to honor, even Richard Wagner 
considering him the greatest song-writer in the world. 
And, indeed, he was the mildest and sweetest of 
creatures, with a face like that of an etherealized 
German pastor and smelling more than any other 
man I ever knew of cigars. Certain other poets — 
though it was more marked in the case of poetesses — 
made their arrival known to the kitchen, the back, 
and the upper parts of the house by the most tremen- 
dous thunders. The thunders would reverberate, die 
away, roll out once more and once more die away 
for periods that seemed very long to the childish mind. 
And these reverberations would be caused, not by 
Apollo, the god of song, nor by any of the Nine Muses, 
nor yet by the clouds that surrounded, as I was then 
convinced, the poetic brow. They were caused by 
dissatisfied cabmen. 

And this was very symptomatic of the day. The 
poet — and still more the poetess — of the seventies and 
eighties, though an awful, was a frail creature, who had 
to be carried about from place to place, and gener- 
ally in a four-wheeled cab. Indeed, if my recollection 
8 107 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

of these poetesses in my very earliest days was accom- 
panied always by thunders and expostulations, my 
images of them in slightly later years, when I was 
not so strictly confined to the nursery — my images 
of them were always those of somewhat elderly ladies, 
forbidding in aspect, with gray hair, hooked noses, 
flashing eyes, and continued trances of indignation 
against reviewers. They emerged ungracefully — for 
no one ever yet managed to emerge gracefully from 
the door of a four-wheeler — sometimes backward, 
from one of those creaking and dismal tabernacles 
and pulling behind them odd-shaped parcels. Hold- 
ing the door open, with his whip in one hand, 
would stand the cabman. He wore an infinite 
number of little capes on his overcoat; a gray 
worsted muffler would be coiled many times round 
his throat, and the lower part of his face and his top 
hat would be of some unglossy material that I have 
never been able to identify. After a short interval, 
his hand would become extended, the flat palm dis- 
playing such coins as the poetess had laid in it. And, 
when the poetess with her odd bundles was three- 
quarters of the way up the doorsteps, the cabman, 
a man of the slowest and most deliberate, would be 
pulling the muffler down from about his mouth and 
exclaiming: "Wot's this .?" 

The poetess, without answering, but with looks of 
enormous disdain, would scuffle into the house and 
the front door would close. Then upon the knocker 

io8 



PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRISONS 



the cabman would commence his thunderous sym- 
phony. 

Somewhat later more four-wheelers would arrive 
with more poetesses. Then still more four-wheelers 
with elderly poets; untidy- looking young gentle- 
men with long hair and wide-awake hats, in attitudes 
of dejection and fatigue, would ascend the steps; a 
hansom or two would drive up containing rather 
smarter, stout, elderly gentlemen wearing as a rule 
black coats with velvet collars and most usually black 
gloves. These were reviewers, editors of the Athe- 
ncBum and of other journals. Then there would come 
quite smart gentlemen with an air of prosperity in 
their clothes and with deference somewhat resembling 
that of undertakers in their manners. These would 
be publishers. 

You are to understand that what was about to pro- 
ceed was the reading to this select gathering of the 
latest volume of poems by Mrs. Clara Fletcher — that 
is not the name — the authoress of what was said to 
be a finer sequence of sonnets than those of Shakes- 
peare. And before a large semicircle of chairs occu- 
pied by the audience that I have described, and with 
Mr. Clara Fletcher standing obsequiously behind 
her to hand to her from the odd-shaped bundles of 
manuscripts the pages that she required, Mrs. Clara 
Fletcher, with her regal head regally poised, having 
quelled the assembly with a single glance, would com- 
mence to read. 

109 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

Mournfully then, up and down the stone staircases, 
there would flow two hollow sounds. For, in those 
days, it was the habit of all poets and poetesses to 
read aloud upon every possible occasion, and whenever 
they read aloud to employ an imitation of the voice 
invented by the late Lord Tennyson and known, in 
those days, as the ore rotundo — "with the round mouth 
mouthing out their hollow o's and a's." 

The effect of this voice heard from outside a door 
was to a young child particularly awful. It went 
on and on, suggesting the muffled baying of a large 
hound that is permanently dissatisfied with the 
world. And this awful rhythm would be broken in 
upon from time to time by the thunders of the cab- 
man. How the housemaid — the housemaid was 
certainly Charlotte Kirby — dealt with this man of 
wrath I never could rightly discover. Apparently 
the cabman would thunder upon the door. Charlotte, 
keeping it on the chain, would open it for about a foot. 
The cabman would exclaim, "Wot's this.?'* and 
Charlotte would shut the door in his face. The cab- 1 
man would remain inactive for four minutes in order 
to recover his breath. Then once more his stiff arm 
would approach the knocker and again the thunders 
would resound. The cabman would exclaim: "A 
bob and a tanner from the Elephant and Castle to 
Tottenham Court Road!" and Charlotte would again 
close the door in his face. This would continue for 
perhaps half an hour. Then the cabman would 

no 1 



PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRISONS 

drive away to meditate. Later he would return and 
the same scenes would be gone through. He would 
retire once more for more meditation and return in 
the company of a policeman. Then Charlotte would 
open the front door wide and by doing no more than 
ejaculating, "My good man!" she would appear to 
sweep out of existence policeman, cab, cab-horse, cab- 
man and whip, and a settled peace would descend 
upon the house, lulled into silence by the reverbera- 
tion of the hollow o's and a's. In about five minutes' 
time the policeman would return and converse amiably 
with Charlotte for three-quarters of an hour through 
the area railings. I suppose that was really why cab- 
men were always worsted and poetesses protected 
from these importunities in the dwelling over whose 
destinies Charlotte presided for forty years. 

The function that was proceeding behind the closed 
doors would now seem incredible; for the poetess 
would redd on from two to three and a half hours. 
At the end of this time — such was the fortitude of 
the artistic when Victoria was still the Widow at 
Windsor — an enormous high babble of applause 
would go up. The forty or fifty poetesses, young poets, 
old poets, painter-poets, reviewers, editors of Athe- 
nceums and the like would divide themselves into solid 
bodies, each body of ten or twelve surrounding one of 
the three or four publishers and forcing this unfortunate 
man to bid against his unfortunate rivals for the 
privilege of publishing this immortal masterpiece. My 

III 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

grandfather would run from body to body, ejaculating: 
"Marvellous genius!" "First woman poet of the age!" 
"Lord Tennyson himself said he was damned if he 
wasn't envious of the sonnet to Mehemet AH!" 

Mr. Clara Fletcher would be trotting about on 
tiptoe fetching for the lady from whom he took his 
name — now exhausted and recumbent in a deep arm- 
chair — smelling bottles, sponges full of aromatic 
vinegar to press upon her brow, glasses of sherry, 
thin biscuits, and raw eggs in tumblers. As a boy I 
used to think vaguely that these comestibles were 
really nectar and ambrosia. 

In the early days I was only once permitted to be 
present at these august ceremonies. I say I was per- 
mitted to be present, but actually I was caught and 
forced very much against my will to attend the rendi- 
tion by my aunt, Lucy Rossetti, who, with persistence, 
that to me at the time appeared fiendish, insisted upon 
attempting to turn me into a genius too. Alas! hearing 
Mr. Arthur O'Shaughnessy read " Music and Moon- 
light " did not turn poor little me into a genius. It sent 
me to sleep, and I was carried from the room by 
Charlotte, disgraced, and destined from that time 
forward only to hear those hollow sounds from the 
other side of the door. Afterward I should see the 
publishers, one proudly descending the stairs, putting 
his check - book back into his overcoat pocket, and 
the others trying vainly to keep their heads erect 
under the glances of scorn that the rest of the de- 

112 



PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRISONS 

parting company poured upon them. And Mr, Clara 
Fletcher would be carefully folding the check into Jiis 
waistcoat pocket, while his wife, from a large reticule, 
produced one more eighteenpence wrapped up in 
tissue-paper. 

This would to-day seem funny — the figure of Mrs. 
Clara Fletcher would be grotesque if it were not for 
the fact that, to a writer, the change that has taken 
place is so exceedingly tragic. For who nowadays 
would think of reading poetry aloud, or what pub- 
lisher would come to listen ? As for a check . . . ! 
Yet this glorious scene that I have described these 
eyes of mine once beheld. 

And then there was that terrible word "genius." 
I think my grandfather, with his romantic mind, first 
obtruded it on my infant notice. But I am quite 
certain that it was my aunt, Mrs. William Rossetti, 
who filled me with a horror of its sound that persists 
to this day. In school-time the children of my family 
were separated from their cousins, but in the holi- 
days, which we spent as a rule during our young years 
in lodging-houses side by side, in places like Bourne- 
mouth or Hythe, we were delivered over to the full 
educational fury of our aunt. For this, no doubt, 
my benevolent but misguided father was responsible. 
He had no respect for schoolmasters, but he had the 
greatest possible respect for his sister-in-law. In 
consequence, our mornings would be taken up in 
listening to readings from the poets or in improving 

"3 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

our knowledge of foreign tongues. My cousins, the 
Rossettis, were horrible monsters of precocity. Let 
me set down here with what malignity I viewed their 
proficiency in Latin and Greek at ages incredibly 
small. Thus, I believe, my cousin Olive wrote a 
Greek play at the age of something like five. And 
they were perpetually being held up to us — or per- 
haps to myself alone, for my brother was always 
very much the sharper of the two — as marvels of 
genius whom I ought to thank God for merely having 
the opportunity to emulate. For my cousin Olive's 
infernal Greek play, which had to do with Theseus 
and the Minotaur, draped in robes of the most flimsy 
butter-muslin, I was drilled, a lanky boy of twelve 
or so, to wander round and round the back drawing- 
room of Endsleigh Gardens, imbecilely flapping my 
naked arms before an audience singularly distinguished 
who were seated in the front room. The scenery, 
which had been designed and painted by my aunt, 
was, I believe, extremely beautiful, and the chinoi- 
sertes, the fine furniture, and the fine pictures were 
such that, had I been allowed to sit peaceably among 
the audience, I might really have enjoyed the piece. 
But it was my unhappy fate to wander round in the 
garb of a captive before an audience that consisted 
of Pre-Raphaelite poets, ambassadors of foreign pow- 
ers, editors, poets-laureate, and Heaven knows what. 
Such formidable beings at least did they appear to 
my childish imagination. From time to time the rather 

114 



PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRISONS 

high voice of my father would exclaim from the 
gloomy depths of the auditorium, "Speak up, Fordie!'* 
Alas! my aptitude for that sort of sport being limited, 
the only words that were allotted to me were the Greek 
lamentation "Theu! Theu! Theu!" and in the mean 
while my cousin, Arthur Rossetti, who appeared only to 
come up to my knee, was the hero Theseus, strode 
about with a large sword, slew dragons, and addressed 
perorations in the Tennysonian " o " and " a " style to the 
candle-lit heavens, with their distant view of Athens. 
Thank God, having been an adventurous youth, 
whose sole idea of true joy was to emulate the doings 
of the hero of a work called Peck's Bad Boy and His 
Pa, or at least to attain to the lesser glories of Dick 
Harkaway, who had a repeating rifle and a tame 
black jaguar, and who bathed in gore almost nightly — 
thank God, I say, that we succeeded in leading our 
unsuspecting cousins into dangerous situations from 
which they only emerged by breaking limbs. I 
seem to remember the young Rossettis as perpetu- 
ally going about with fractured bones. I dis- 
tinctly remember the fact that I bagged my cousin 
Arthur with one collar-bone, broken on a boat slide 
in my company, while my younger sister brought 
down her cousin Mary with a broken elbow, frac- 
tured in a stone hall. Olive Rossetti, I also remember 
with gratification, cut her head open at a party given 
by Miss Mary Robinson, because she wanted to 
follow me down some dangerous steps and fell onto 

115 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

a flower-pot. Thus, if we were immolated in butter- 
muslin fetters and in Greek plays, we kept our own 
end up a little and we never got hurt. Why, I remem- 
ber pushing my brother out of a second-floor window 
so that he fell into the area, and he didn't have even 
a bruise to show, while my cousins in the full glory 
of their genius were never really all of them together 
quite out of the bonesetter's hands. 

My aunt gave us our bad hours with her excellent 
lessons, but I think we gave her hers; so let the 
score be called balanced. Why, I remember pour- 
ing a pot of ink from the first-story banisters onto 
the head of Ariadne Petrici when she was arrayed 
in the robes of her namesake, whose part she sup- 
ported. For let it not be imagined that my aunt 
Rossetti foisted my cousin Arthur into the position 
of hero of the play through any kind of maternal 
jealousy. Not at all. She was just as anxious to 
turn me into a genius, or to turn anybody into a genius. 
It was only that she had such much better material 
in her own children. 

Ah, that searching for genius, that reading aloud 
of poems, that splendid keeping alive of the tradition 
that a poet was a seer and a priest by the sheer virtue 
of his craft and mystery! Nowadays, alas! for a writer 
to meet with any consideration at all in the world he 
or she must be at least a social reformer. That began, 
for the aesthetic set at least, with William Morris, who 
first turned all poets and poetesses into long-necked 

ii6 



4l 



PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRISONS 

creatures with red ties, or into round-shouldered 
maidens dressed in blue curtain serge. For, indeed, 
when aestheticism merged itself in social propaganda 
the last poor little fortress of the arts in England was 
divested of its gallant garrison. It might be comic 
that my Aunt Lucy should turn her residence into a sort 
of hothouse and forcing-school for geniuses; it might 
be comic that my grandfather should proclaim that 
Mrs. Clara Fletcher's sonnets were finer than those 
of Shakespeare. It might be comic even that all the 
Pre-Raphaelite poets should back each other up, and 
all the Pre-Raphaelite painters spend hours every day 
in jobbing each other's masterpieces into municipal 
galleries. But behind it there was a feeling that the 
profession of the arts or the humaner letters was a 
priestcraft and of itself consecrated its earnest votary. 
Nowadays . . . 

Last week upon three memorable days I had for me 
three memorable conversations. On the Saturday I 
was sitting in Kensington Gardens with a young 
French student of letters, and after we had conversed 
for sufficiently long for the timid young man to allow 
himself a familiarity he said : 

"Now tell me why it is that all your English novel- 
ists so desperately desire to be politicians .?" 

This seemed to him to be an astonishing and un- 
reasonable, and even a slightly indecent, state of 
affairs, so that he mentioned it under his breath. 

On the next day, being Sunday, I had the privilege 

117 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

of being admitted into the drawing-room of a very 
old lady of distinction. She happened, after talking 
of persons as long dead as D'Orsay, to mention that 
the wife of a cabinet minister had come into her draw- 
ing-room on an afternoon shortly before and had said 
that she had been present at the first night of a play. 
This had so enormously moved her that she had 
fainted and had been removed from the theatre by 
another cabinet minister, a friend of her husband's. 
This play dealt with prison life. The scene which so 
moved the lady showed you a silent stage — a convict 
seated in his cell. From a distance there came the 
sound of violently shaken metal. It was repeated 
nearer, it was echoed still nearer and nearer. And 
then the convict, an enormous agitation reaching him 
with all these contagious sounds, flew desperately at 
his cell door and shook it to the accompaniment of 
an intolerable jangle of iron. This scene of the 
poor wretch, with his agonized nerves shaken by long, 
solitary confinement, so worked upon the sympathetic 
nerves of the cabinet minister's wife that she declared 
herself determined to leave no stone unturned until 
the prison laws of the United Kingdom were altered 
infinitely for the more humane. 

We have thus one more instance of a work of 
literature which destroys whole methods of thought 
and sweeps away whole existent systems. And this 
play must take its rank along with Uncle Tom's Cahiriy 
which destroyed slavery in the United States; along 

ii8 



PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRISONS 

with Oliver Twist, which destroyed the Poor -Law 
system in England ; with Don Quixote, which de- 
stroyed chivalry, or with Beaumarchais' Figaro, which 
led in the French Revolution. But, as an epilogue, 
I should like to add my third conversation, which took 
place on a Monday. On that occasion I was afforded 
the privilege of talking for a long time with a convict 
— a gentleman on the face of him — one of the most 
degenerate Irish Cockneys that our modern civiliza- 
tion could bless us with. In his queer uniform of 
mustard-color and blue, this odd, monstrous little 
chap, with a six days' beard and a face like that of a 
wizened monkey, trotted beside me and uttered words 
of wisdom. He told me many interesting things. Thus, 
being a criminal of the lowest type, he was a Roman 
Catholic, and he enlarged upon the hardships that 
prisoners of his religion had to put up with in gaol. 
Thus, for instance, one of the two meat courses which 
prisoners are allowed during the week falls upon 
Friday, and the poor Papists do not eat meat upon 
Fridays. Or, again, Roman Catholic prisoners are 
not allowed the enormous luxury of a daily religious 
service, and readers of Mr. Cunningham Grahame's 
prison experiences will realize how enormous this 
deprivation is. With its hours giving possibilities 
of conversation, of joining in the hoarsely roared 
Psalms, and of meeting under the shadow of God 
Almighty even the warder's eyes on some sort of 
equality, there are few occasions of joy more absolute 

119 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

in the life of a convict or of any man. Yet these 
deprivations my friend Hennessy cheerfully suffered, 
and, talking of a prisoner called Flaherty, who had 
written himself down a Protestant in order to earn 
these extra privileges, Mr. Hennessy said in tones of 
the deepest reprobation: "I call that a poor sort of 
conjuring trick!" And, spitting out a piece of oakum 
that he had been chewing, he repeated in abstracted 
tones, "A b poor kind of conjuring trick!" 

Mr. Hennessy, you will observe, was the worst type 
of criminal, the greater part of his life having been 
spent on "the Scrubbs," as the prisoners call it when 
they are talking among themselves, or *'in the cruel 
place," as they say when they are being interviewed 
by gentle philanthropists. Mr. Hennessy pulled 
another small piece of oakum from the lining of his 
waistcoat, which boasted a broad arrow upon either 
chest, and proceeded to soliloquize: 

"Cor!" he said, "it do do you blooming good to be 
in this blooming hotel. It soaks the beer out of you. 
Reg'lar soaks the beer out of you. When you've bin 
in 'ere free days, you feels another man. Soaks the 
beer out of you, that's what it does." 

He proceeded upon the old line, harking back upon 
his thoughts: 

"A poor sort of conjuring trick, that's what it is. 
And I guess God A'mighty looks after us. He sends 
the b sparrows." 

For the sparrows, recognizing the chapel time of 

120 



il 



PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRISONS 

the Protestants, are accustomed to fly in at the cell 
windows while chapel is on and to search the cell for 
crumbs. And if by chance they find a Catholic there 
they do not seem to mind him very much. My friend 

Hennessy, indeed, had a "b sparrow" that 

would come and perch upon his forefinger, and this 
appeared to afford him as much gratification as if he 
had earned all the profits of his poor sort of conjur- 
ing trick. It afforded him much solace, too, since 
it appeared to him a visible sign from the Almighty 
that He who disregardeth not the fall of a sparrow 
could, by means of that little bird, find means and 
leisure to solace him while he suffered from sectarian 
injustice. For this sectarian inequality would pursue 
my friend Hennessy even when he left the gaol gates, 
the Protestant chaplain being provided with a sum 
of money wherewith to pay the fares home of departed 
prisoners, to furnish them with boots, and even to set 
them up in costers' stalls. " Flaherty," Mr. Hennessy 
said, ** he'll get his blooming half-crown or free-and- 
six, but our blooming priest, he's as poor as meself." 

And Mr. Hennessy once more spat reflectively, and 
added: "But I call it a poor sort of conjuring trick." 

Considering the opportunity an excellent one for 
getting information, I proceeded to describe as vividly 
as I could the scene from the play that I have men- 
tioned — the scene which had made the cabinet min- 
ister's wife faint, the scene which had so drastically 
altered the prison laws of the United Kingdom. Mr. 

121 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

Hennessy listened to me with an air somewhat resem- 
bling philosophic disgust. 

"Cor!" he said. He crooked his two forefingers 
one into the other, and drew my attention to 
them. 

"D'ye know what that means, sor ?" he asked. 

I said I didn't, and he continued: "It means 
Flanagan's trick. When we make that sign to each 
other at exercise it means that every man jack in gaol 
will shake his door after lights-out. If you all make 

the row together, the b bloaters can't spot any 

one of you, and they can't have the whole b 

prison up before Dot and Dash in the morning. It's 
the fun of yer life to hear the bloaters curse." 

The "bloaters" are, of course, the warders, and 
Dot and Dash was the nickname for the governor of 
this particular gaol, since one of his legs was slightly 
shorter than the other, and he walked unequally. 

Thus, "the fun of yer life," invented by the im- 
mortal Flanagan, whoever he was, and celebrated by 
my excellent friend Mr. Hennessy, becomes the 
epoch-making scene of a drama which changes the law 
of an empire. I have no particular comment to make, 
being a simple writer, recording things that have come 
under my own observation, but I should like to put 
on record, as linking up the " constatation" of what may 
otherwise appear an extremely loose dissertation, my 
reply to my young friend the Frenchman, who, with 
his eyes veiled, as if he were asking a rather obscene 

122 



I 



PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRISONS 

question, had put it to me: "Is it true, then, that all 
you English novelists desire to be politicians ?" 

I answered that it was entirely true, and the reason 
was that in England a writer, not being regarded as a 
gentleman, except in the speech of the cabinet minister 
who may happen to reply to the toast of Literature 
at a Royal Academy banquet, or if he happens to sit 
upon a jury, when he becomes ipso facto one of the 
"gentlemen" to whom learned counsel yearningly 
addresses himself — in England all writers being well 
aware that they are not regarded as gentlemen, and, 
indeed, aware that they are hardly regarded as men, 
since we must consider the practitioners of all the arts 
as at least effeminate, if not a decent kind of eunuch — 
all writers in England desire to be something else as 
well. Sometimes, anxious to assert their manhood, 
they cultivate small holdings, sail the seas, hire out 
fishing - boats, travel in caravans, engage in county 
cricket, or become justices of the peace. I related 
to my young French friend how, one day, it being my 
great privilege to lunch with the gentleman whom I 
consider to be the finest writer of English in the world, 
the man possessing the most limpid, the most pure, 
the most beautiful of English styles, I happened 
modestly and bashfully to express my opinion of 
his works to the great man. He turned upon 
me with an extraordinary aquiline fury and ex- 
claimed: 

"Stylist! Me a stylist? Stevenson was a stylist, 
9 123 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

Pater was a stylist. I have no time for that twiddling 
nonsense. I'm a coleopterist." 

And there, as I explained to my young French 
friend, you have the whole thing in a nutshell. This 
great writer had the strongest possible objection to 
being classed with a tuberculous creature like Steven- 
son, or with an Oxford don like Pater. He wanted 
to be remembered as one who had chased danger- 
ous reptiles — if coleoptera are dangerous reptiles! — 
through the frozen forests of Labrador to the icy 
recesses of the Pole itself. He wanted to be remem- 
bered as a man, a sort of creature once removed 
from an orang-outang, who smote a hairy breast 
and roared defiance to the rough places of the earth. 
So that some of us plough the seas; some of us dig up 
potatoes; some of us jump the blind baggage on 
transcontinental trains in the United States of America; 
some of us are miners, and some of us open rifle- 
ranges; some of us keep goats; others indulge in 
apiculture — but by far the most of us desire to be 
influences. 

"And I assure you, my dear young friend," I said 
to the Frenchman, "this is a very great temptation. 
L'autre jour j'etais assis dans un club litteraire — I was 
seated in a literary club, conversing with some of 
messieurs mes confreres, when there entered a young 
man like yourself — very much like yourself, but 
not so modest. We were drinking tea. Yes, my 
young friend, in England all the literary men drink, 

124 



PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRISONS 

not absinthe, nor orgeat, nor bocks, nor even chassis, 
but tea. And this young man who entered, being 
young, with great confidence, contradicted every 
single word that was uttered by my distinguished 
confreres, but more particularly every single word 
that was uttered by myself. He contradicted me, in- 
deed, before I could get my words out at all, and 
I felt very refreshed and happy, for it is very 
pleasant when the extremely young treat one still as 
an equal. But it happened that one of my distin- 
guished confreres, possessed of a loud and distinct 
organ, pronounced my name so that it could not 
escape the ears of this young man, who, until that 
moment, did not know who I was. He was lift- 
ing a cup of tea to his mouth, and — it struck me 
as an extraordinary fact — the cup of tea remained 
suspended between mouth and saucer for an im- 
mensely long period of time. The young man's eyes 
became enormous; his jaws fell open, and he remained 
silent. The conversation drifted on. He succeeded 
in drinking his tea eventually, but still — he remained 
silent. My honored confreres one by one went away 
on their errands to make, each one, the world a little 
better. I remained alone with our silent young friend, 
and at last, making my decent excuses, I rose to go. 
Suddenly this young man sprang up and, formally 
addressing me by name, he brought out in rather 
trembling tones: 

" ' I want to thank you for all you've done for me.' 

125 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

"'My God!' I ejaculated, 'What is all this ? What 
have I done for you ?' 

"'You have,' he answ^ered, 'by your w^ritings in- 
fluenced my whole Hfe.' 

" I was so overwhelmed, I was so appalled, I was so 
extraordinarily confused, that I bolted out of the room. 
I did not, my young French friend, know in the least 
what to do with this singular present. And I am bound 
to say that in about five minutes I felt extraordinarily 
pleased. 

" I had never been so pleased before in my life. 
One kind writer once said that I wrote as preciously 
— though I was not, of course, half as important — 
as the late Robert Louis Stevenson! Another kindly 
editor once told me to my face that he considered 
me to be the finest novelist in England. He added 
that there was only one person who was my equal, and 
that, the latest literary knight ! That, my young 
French friend, was a present whose flavor you will 
hardly appreciate. 

" But, kurz und gut, I have had my triumphs. 
Yet never — no, never, till that moment — had I been 
called an influence. Oh yes, the pleasure was extra- 
ordinary. I walked through the streets as if I were 
dancing on air; never had the world looked so good. 
I imagined that my words must be heard deferentially 
in the War Oflfiice, which I was then passing, and I 
proceeded to walk down Downing Street to look at 
the several ministries, where, obviously, my words 

126 



PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRISONS 

must have immense weight. Very nearly I sent in 
my card to the Foreign Minister with the view of 
giving him my opinions on the relations between 
England and Germany. 

**In the green park, continuing my walk home, I 
said to myself, I am an influence! By God! I am an 
influence like A and B and C and D and E and F and 
G and H, and like all of them — all of them influences. 

" I felt as important as the Pope must have 
done when he penned the encyclical 'Pascendi Gre- 
ges.' I was astounded that no one turned round in 
awe to observe my passing by. The sweetest moment 
in my life! . . . 

"Of course reaction came. It could not have 
been otherwise, since I was brought up in the back 
rooms and nurseries of Pre-Raphaelism, which, for 
better or for worse, held that to be an artist was to 
be the most august thing in life. And nowadays 
I seldom think of that sweet moment. Only when I 
am very drunk, indeed, deep, deep drunk in tea, do 
I remember that once for five minutes I looked upon 
myself as an influence. 

"Being a man of enormous moral integrity (my 
young French friend, you came of a nation inferior and 
unacquainted with the sterner virtues) — being a man 
of an enormous moral integrity — or being a low-spirited 
sort of person — I have resolutely put from me this 
temptation, or, if you will, I have never had the 
courage again to aspire to these dizzy heights. 

127 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

*' But now I can well understand why it is that my 
distinguished confreres A, B, C, D, and all the rest 
of the letters of the alphabet, aspire to the giddy 
heights of power. For, figure to yourself, my dear 
young French friend, how I, the mere writer, de- 
spisedly walk the streets. But should I just once take 
up the cause, let us say of my oppressed friend 
Hennessy, at once all sorts of doors and all sorts of 
columns would be open to me. The Times would print 
my letters; I should be admitted into the private 
room of whatever cabinet minister it was that had 
Hennessy in his charge. I would, yes, by heavens! 
I would make that cabinet minister's wife not only 
faint, but go into three separate fits of hysterics by 
my grewsome accounts of Hennessy's wrongs. I 
should dine with archbishops. I should receive a 
letter of thanks from the Pope. I should event- 
ually triumphantly contest the Scotland division 
of Liverpool and, becoming arbitrator of the des- 
tinies of the empire, I should be styled before the 
Speaker of the Mother of Parliaments not only a 
gentleman, but, by heavens, an honorable gentle- 
man! . . . 

At this point of my rhapsody we were approached 
by an official, and, on his refusal to believe that we 
had already paid for our chairs, we were summarily 
ejected. 

Now, do not let me be suspected of preaching a 
campaign to the effect that the writer should stick to 

128 



PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRISONS 

his pen. I am merely anxious to emphasize the Hghts 
and shadows of Pre-Raphaelite days by contrasting 
them with the very changed conditions that to-day 
prevail. You might say, on the one hand, our poets 
are now influences, and that, on the other, they no 
longer get checks. And you might continue the pros 
and cons to the end of the chapter. Nor do I wish 
to say that the author ought to steel his heart against 
the wrongs of suffering humanity or of the brute 
creation. By all means, if he shall observe individual 
examples of the oppressed and of the suffering — poor 
devils like my friend Hennessy, or the miserable horses 
that we export to Belgium — let him do his best to 
alleviate their unhappy lot. But these the old-fash- 
ioned Pre-Raphaelite would have said are the func- 
tions of the artist as private citizen. His art is 
something more mysterious and something more 
sacred. As I have elsewhere pointed out, my grand- 
father, a romantic old gentleman of the Tory per- 
suasion by predisposition, was accustomed to express 
himself as being advanced in the extreme in his ideas. 
Such was his pleasant fancy that I am quite certain 
he would have sported a red tie had it not clashed 
with the blue linen shirts that he habitually wore. 
And, similarly, my Aunt Rossetti, to whom my infant 
thoughts were so frequently intrusted — this energetic 
and romantic lady was of such advanced ideas that I 
have heard her regret that she was not born early 
enough to be able to wet her handkerchief in the blood 

129 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

of the aristocrats during the French Reign of Terror. 
Nay, more, during that splendid youth of the world 
in the eighties and nineties, the words "the Social 
Revolution" were forever on our lips. We spoke 
of it as if it were always just around the corner, like 
the three-horse omnibus which used to run from 
Portland Place to Charing Cross Station — a bulky 
conveyance which we used to regard with longing 
eyes as being eminently fitted, if it were upset, to form 
the very breastwork of a barricade — in these young, 
splendid, and stern days my cousins, the Rossettis, 
aided, if not pushed to it, by my energetic, romantic 
aunt, founded that celebrated anarchist organ known 
as The Torch. But, though my grandfather hankered 
after wearing a red tie, said that all lords were damned 
flunkeys, that all her Majesty's judges were venial 
scoundrels, all police magistrates worse than Judas 
Iscariot, and all policemen worse even than Royal 
Academicians — it would never, no, it would never 
have entered his head to turn one of his frescoes in 
the Town Hall, Manchester, into a medium for the 
propaganda of the Social Revolution. He hated the 
bourgeoisie with a proper hatred, but it was the tra- 
ditional hatred of the French artist. The bourgeoisie 
returned his hatred to more purpose, for, just before 
his death, the Town Council of Manchester, with the 
Lord Mayor at its head, sitting in private, put for- 
ward a resolution that his frescoes in the Town Hall 
should be whitewashed out and their places taken by 

130 



PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRISONS 

advertisements of the wares of the aldermen and the 
councillors. Thus perished Ford Madox Brown — for 
this resolution, which was forwarded to him, gave 
him his fatal attack of apoplexy. The bourgeoisie 
had triumphed. 

Or, again, Madox Brown, in his picturesque desire 
to champion the oppressed, once took up the cause of 
a Royal Academician. This poor gentleman, having 
grown extremely old, and being entirely color-blind, 
so that he painted pictures containing green heads and 
blue hands, was no longer permitted by his brothers 
of the Immortal Forty to occupy with his work the 
one hundred and forty feet on the line that are allotted 
to every Academician at Burlington House. Madox 
Brown entered into the fray for redressing the wrongs 
of this injured and color-blind person. He wrote 
articles about Mr. D. in the late Mr. Quilter's Uni- 
versal Review. He deluged the Times with letters 
in which he said that, "though dog does not eat dog, 
the Academic vulture was ready to feed on its own 
carrion.'* He trundled off in four-wheelers to inter- 
view the art critic of almost every daily paper in 
London. Indeed, I never remember such a row 
in that picturesque household as was caused by the 
sorrows of this unfortunate Academician. But it 
never, no, it never entered Madox Brown's head to 
paint a gigantic picture representing all the Forty 
Academicians gorging enormously on turkeys, walnuts, 
and pork, while outside the walls of Burlington House 

131 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

in a winter night, with the snow four feet thick, the 
unfortunate D., with placards bearing the words 
"Color BHnd" on his chest, and his bony shoulders 
sticking through his ragged clothes, drew in chalks 
upon the pavement exquisite classical pictures whose 
heads were green and whose hands were blue. This, 
however, was what William Morris, breaking away 
from his dyes and his tapestries, taught the young 
artist to do. 



VII 

ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE 

THE art with which Wilh'am Morris and such 
disciples of his as Commendatore Walter Crane 
propagandized on behalf of that splendid thing, the 
"Social Revolution," was, upon the whole, still within 
the canons which would have been allowed by the 
aesthetes who called themselves Pre-Raphaelites. In 
his News from Nowhere Morris tried to show us 
young things what a beautiful world we should make 
of it if sedulously we attended the Sunday evening 
lectures at Kelmscott House, the Mall, Hammer- 
smith. At Kelmscott House, I believe, the first electric 
telegraph was constructed, and it was in the shed 
where the first cable was made that we used to meet 
to hasten on the Social Revolution and to recon- 
struct a lovely world. As far as I remember those 
young dreams, it was to be all a matter of huge- 
limbed and splendid women, striding along dressed 
in loose curtain -serge garments, and bearing upon 
the one arm such sheaves of wheat as never were and, 
upon the other, such babies as every proud mother 
imagines her first baby to be. And on Sunday after- 

133 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

noons, in a pleasant lamplight, to a number per- 
haps of a hundred and fifty, there we used to gather 
in that shed. William Morris would stride up and 
down between the aisles, pushing his hands with a 
perpetual, irate movement through his splendid hair. 
And we, the young men with long necks, long, fair 
hair, protruding blue eyes, and red ties, or the young 
maidens in our blue curtain serge with our round 
shoulders, our necks made as long as possible to 
resemble Rossetti drawings, uttered with rapt ex- 
pression long sentences about the Social Revolution 
that was just round the corner. We thought we were 
beautiful, we thought we were very beautiful; but Pre- 
Raphaelism is dead, xstheticism is dead. Poor Will- 
iam Morris is very dead, too, and the age when poetry 
was marketable is most dead of all. It is dead, all 
dead, and that beautiful vision, the Social Revolution, 
has vanished along with the 'bus that used to run 
from the Langham Hotel, beloved of American visit- 
ors, to Charing Cross — the 'bus with its three horses 
abreast, its great length, and its great umbrella per- 
manently fixed above the driver's head. Alas! that 
'bus will serve to build up no barricade when the 
ultimate revolution comes, and when it comes the 
ultimate revolution will not be our beloved Social one 
of the large women, curtain serge, wheat-sheaves, and 
the dream babies. No, it will be different. And, I 
suppose, the fine flower that those days produced 
is none other than Mr. Bernard Shaw. 

134 




WILLIAM MORRIS 



ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE 

But in those days we had no thought of Fabianism. 
Nevertheless, we managed to get up some pretty tidy 
rows among ourselves. I must, personally, have had 
three separate sets of political opinions. To irritate 
my relatives, who advocated advanced thought, I 
dimly remember that I professed myself a Tory. 
Among the bourgeoisie, whom it was my inherited 
duty to epateVy I passed for a dangerous anarchist. 
In general speech, manner and appearance I must 
have resembled a socialist of the Morris group. I 
don't know what I was; I don't know what I am. 
It doesn't, I suppose, matter in the least, but I fancy 
I must have been a very typical young man of the sort 
who formed the glorious meetings that filled the world 
in the eighties and early nineties. There used to be 
terrific rows between socialists and anarchists in those 
days. I think I must have been on the side of the 
anarchists, because the socialists were unreasonably 
aggressive. They were always holding meetings, at 
which the subject for debate would be: "The Foolish- 
ness of Anarchism." This would naturally annoy the 
harmless and gentle anarchists, who only wanted to 
be let alone, to loaf in Goodge Street, and to victimize 
any one who came into the offices of The Torch and 
had half-a-crown to spend on beer. 

In The Torch office, which, upon the death of my 
aunt Rossetti, left the house of William Rossetti, 
you would generally find some dirty, eloquent scoun- 
drel called Ravachol or Vaillant who, for the price of 

135 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

a pint of beer, would pour forth so enormous a flood 
of invective and of self-glorification that you would 
not believe him capable of hurting a rabbit. Then, a 
little afterward, you would hear of a bomb thrown 
in Barcelona or Madrid, and Ravachol or Vaillant, 
still eloquent and still attitudinizing, would go to his 
death under the guillotine or in the garrote. I don't 
know where the crowds came from that supported 
us as anarchists, but I have seldom seen a crowd so 
great as that which attended the funeral of the poor 
idiot who blew himself to pieces in the attempt on 
Greenwich Observatory. This was, of course, an 
attempt fomented by the police agents of a foreign 
state with a view to forcing the hand of the British 
Government. The unfortunate idiot was talked by 
these agents provocateurs into taking a bomb to Green- 
wich Park, where the bomb exploded in his pocket 
and blew him into many small fragments. The idea 
of the government in question was that this would 
force the hand of the British Government so that 
they would arrest wholesale every anarchist in Great 
Britain. Of course, the British Government did noth- 
ing of the sort, and the crowd in Tottenham Court Road 
which attended the funeral of the small remains of the 
victim was, as I have said, one of the largest that I 
have ever seen. Who were they all ^. Where did they 
all come from } Whither have they all disappeared ? 
I am sure I don't know, just as I am pretty certain 
that, in all those thousands who filled Tottenham 

136 



ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE 

Court Road, there was not one who was more capable 
than myself of beginning to think of throwing a bomb. 
I suppose it was the spirit of romance, of youth, per- 
haps of sheer tomfoolery, perhaps of the spirit of 
adventure, which is no longer very easy for men to 
find in our world of gray and teeming cities. I couldn't 
be Dick Harkaway with a Winchester rifle, so I took 
it out in monstrous solemn fun, of the philosophic 
anarchist kind, and I was probably one of twenty 
thousand. My companion upon this occasion was 
Comrade P., who, until quite lately, might be observed 
in the neighborhood of the British Museum — a man 
with an immensely long beard, with immensely long 
hair, bareheaded, bare-legged, in short running draw- 
ers, and a boatman's jersey, that left bare his arms and 
chest. Comrade P. was a medical man of great skill, 
an eminently philosophic anarchist. He was so 
advanced in his ideas that he dispensed with animal 
food, dispensed with alcohol, and intensely desired to 
dispense with all clothing. This brought him many 
times into collision with the police, and as many times 
he was sent to prison for causing a crowd to assemble 
in Hyde Park, where he would appear to all intents 
and purposes in a state of nature. He lived, however, 
entirely upon crushed nuts. Prison diet, which 
appeared to him sinfully luxurious, inevitably upset 
his digestion. They would place him in the infirmary 
and would feed him on boiled f:hicken, jellies, beef-tea, 
and caviare, and all the while he would cry out for 

^37 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

nuts, and grow worse and worse, the prison doctors 
regularly informing him that nuts were poison. At 
last Comrade P. would be upon the point of death, 
and then they would give him nuts. P. would immedi- 
ately recover, usually about the time that his sentence 
had expired. Then, upon the Sunday, he would 
once more appear like a Greek athlete running 
through Hyde Park. A most learned and gentle 
person, most entertaining, and the best of company, 
this was still the passion of his life. The books in the 
British Museum were almost a necessity of his exis- 
tence, yet he would walk into the reading - room 
attired only in a blanket, which he would hand to 
the cloak-room attendant, asking for a check in re- 
turn. Eventually his reader's ticket was withdrawn, 
though with reluctance on the part of the authorities, 
for he was a fine scholar, and they very humane 
men. Some time after this Comrade P. proposed to 
me that I should accompany him on the top of a 'bus. 
His idea was that he would be attired in a long ulster; 
this he would take off and hand to me, whereupon I 
was to get down and leave him in this secure position. 
My courage was insufficient — the united courages of 
all Comrade P.'s friends were insufficient to let them 
aid him in giving thus early a demonstration of what 
nowadays we call the Simple Life, and Comrade P. 
had to sacrifice his overcoat. He threw it, that is to 
say, from the top of the 'bus, and, with his hair and 
beard streaming over his uncovered frame, defied alike 

138 



ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE 

the elements and the police. The driver took the 
'bus, Comrade P. and all into an empty stable, where 
they locked him up until the police arrived v^ith a 
stretcher from Bow^ Street. At last the magistrate 
before w^hom Comrade P. habitually appeared grew 
tired of sentencing him. Comrade P. was, moreover, 
so evidently an educated and high-minded man that 
the stipendiary perhaps was touched by his steadfast- 
ness. At all events, he invited P. to dinner — I don't 
know what clothes P. wore upon this occasion. Over 
this friendly meal he extracted from P. a promise 
that he would wear the costume of running-drawers, 
an oarsman's jersey, and sandals which I have already 
described, and which the magistrate himself designed. 
Nothing would have persuaded P. to give this promise 
had not the magistrate promised in return to get for 
P. the reader's ticket at the British Museum which 
he had forfeited. And so, for many years, in this 
statutory attire P., growing grayer and grayer, might 
be seen walking about the streets of Bloomsbury. 
Some years afterward, when I occupied a cottage in 
the country, P. wrote and asked to be permitted to 
live in my garden in a state of nature. But, dreading 
the opinions of my country neighbors, I refused, and 
that was the last I heard of him. 

What with poets, arts and craftsmen, anarchists, 

dock-strikes, unemployed riots and demonstrations 

in Trafalgar Square, those years were very lively 

and stirring for the young. We continued to be 

10 139 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

cranks in a high-spirited and tentative manner. 
Nowadays, what remains of that movement seems to 
have become much more cut and dried; to have 
become much more theoretic; to know much more 
and to get much less fun out of it. You have, on the 
one hand, the Fabian Society, and, on the other, the 
Garden Cities, where any number of Comrade P.'s 
can be accommodated. The movement has probably 
spread numerically, but it has passed as a factor out 
of the life of the day. I don't know what killed it. 

As far as I am personally concerned, my interest 
seemed to wane at about the time when there was a 
tremendous row in one of the socialist clubs because 
some enthusiastic gentleman in a red tie publicly 
drank wine out of a female convert's shoe. Why 
there should have been a row, whether it was wrong 
to drink wine, or to drink it out of a shoe, or what it 
was all about, I never could quite make out. But the 
life appeared to die out of things about then. Perhaps 
it was about that time that the first Fabian tract was 
published. I remember being present later at a 
Fabian debate as to the attributes of the Deity. I 
forget what it was all about, but it lasted a very con- 
siderable time. Toward the end of the meeting an 
energetic lady arose — it was, I think, her first attend- 
ance at a Fabian meeting — and remarked: 

"All this talk is very fine, but what I want to know 
is, whether the Fabian Society does, or does not, 
believe in God .?" 

140 



ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE 

A timid gentleman rose and replied: 

"If Mrs. Y. will read Fabian Tract 312 she will 
discover what she ought to think upon this matter." 

They had codified everything by then. But in the 
earliest days we all wobbled gloriously. Thus, upon 
his first coming to London, Mr. Bernard Shaw wrote 
a pamphlet called Why I Am an Anarchist. This was, I 
think, printed at The Torch press. At any rate, the 
young proprietors of that organ came into possession 
of a large number of copies of the pamphlet. I have 
twice seen Mr. Shaw unmanned — three times if I in- 
clude an occasion upon a railway platform when a loco- 
motive outvoiced him. One of the other occasions 
was when Mr. Shaw, having advanced a stage further 
toward his intellectual salvation, was addressing in 
the Park a socialist gathering on the tiresome text 
of the "Foolishness of Anarchism." The young 
proprietors of The Torch walked round and round in 
the outskirts of the crowd offering copies of Mr. 
Shaw's earlier pamphlet for sale, and exclaiming at 
the top of their voices, ^^ Why I Am an Anarchist! 
By the lecturer!" 

But even in those days Mr. Shaw had us for his 
enthusiastic supporters. I suppose we did not put 
much money into his pockets, for I well remember 
his relating a sad anecdote whose date must have 
fallen among the eighties. As Mr. Shaw put it, like 
every poor young man when he first comes to London, 
he possessed no presentable garments at all save a suit 

141 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

of dress clothes. In this state he received an invita- 
tion to a soiree from some gentleman high in the 
political world — 1 think it was Mr. Haldane. This 
gentleman was careful to add a postscript in the kind- 
ness of his heart, begging Mr. Shaw not to dress, 
since every one would be in their morning clothes. 
Mr. Shaw was accordingly put into an extraordinary 
state of perturbation. He pawned or sold all the 
articles of clothing in his possession, including his 
evening suit, and with the proceeds purchased a 
decent suit of black resembling, as he put it, that of 
a Wesleyan minister. Upon his going up the staircase 
of the house to which he was invited the first person 
he perceived was Mr. Balfour, in evening dress; the 
second was Mr. Wyndham, in evening dress; and 
immediately he was introduced into a dazzling hall 
that was one sea of white shirt - fronts relieved by 
black swallow-tails. He was the only undressed per- 
son in the room. Then his kind host presented him- 
self, his face beaming with philanthropy and with 
the thought of kindly encouragement that he had given 
to struggling genius! I think Mr. Shaw does not 
"dress" at all nowadays, and in the dress affected, 
at all events by his disciples, the gray homespuns, 
the soft hats, the comfortable bagginess about the 
knees, and the air that the pockets have of always 
being full of apples, the last faint trickle of Pre- 
Raphaelite influence is to be perceived. Madox 
Brown always wore a black morning coat edged with 

142 



ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE 

black braid during the day, but Rossetti, at any rate 
when he was at work, was much addicted to gray 
frieze. He wore habitually a curious coat of pepper- 
and-salt material, in shape resembling a clergyman's 
ordinary dress, but split down the lateral seams so 
that the whole front of the coat formed on each side 
one large pocket. When he went out — which, as Mr. 
Meredith has informed us, was much too seldom for 
his health — he wore a gray frieze Inverness cape of 
a thickness so extraordinary that it was as stiff as 
millboard. This grayness and roughness very much 
influenced his disciples and spread to the disciples 
of William Morris, with the results that we see at 
present. I know this to be the fact from the following 
circumstances : Upon Rossetti's death his Inverness, 
to which I have alluded and which was made in the 
year 1869, descended to my grandfather. Upon my 
grandfather's death it descended to me, it being then 
twenty-three years old. I wore it with feelings of 
immense pride, as if it had been — and indeed, was 
it not ? — the mantle of a prophet. And such approba- 
tion did it meet with in my young friends of that date 
that this identical garment was copied seven times, 
and each time for the use of a gentleman whose works 
when Booksellers' Row stilU existed might ordinarily 
be found in the twopenny box. So this garment 
spread the true tradition, and, indeed, it was im- 
perishable and indestructible, though what has be- 
come of it by now I do not know. I wore it for several 

143 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

years until it must have been aged probably thirty, 
when, happening to wear it during a visit to my tailor's 
and telling that gentleman its romantic history, I was 
distressed to hear him remark, looking over his 
pince-nez: 

"Time the moths had it!" 

This shed such a slight upon the garment from the 
point of view of tailors that I never wore it again. It 
fell, I am afraid, into the hands of a family with little 
respect for relics of the great, and I am fairly certain 
that I observed its capacious folds in the mists of an 
early morning upon Romney Marsh some months ago, 
enveloping the limbs of an elderly and poaching 
scoundrel called Slingsby. 

But, indeed, the gray frieze apart, there was little 
enough in externals about the inner ring of the Pre- 
Raphaelites that was decorative. Rossetti wore gray 
frieze, because it was the least bothersome of materials; 
it never wanted brushing, it never wanted renewing; 
there it was. Madox Brown wore always an emi- 
nently un-Bohemian suit of black. Christina Rossetti 
affected the least picturesque of black garments for 
daily use, while on occasions of a festive nature she 
would go as far as a pearl-gray watered silk. Millais, 
of course, was purely conventional in attire, and so 
was Holman Hunt. I remember meeting Holman 
Hunt outside High Street, Kensington Station, on a 
rather warmish day. He was wearing an overcoat of 
extremely fine, light-colored fur. To this he drew my 

144 



ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE 

attention, and proceeded to lecture me upon the 
virtues of economy, saying with his prophetic air: 

''Young man, observe this garment. I bought it in 
the year 1852, giving a hundred and forty pounds for it. 
It is now 1894. This overcoat has therefore lasted 
me forty-two years and I have never had another. 
You will observe that it has actually cost me per 
annum something less than ^^3 los., which is much less, 
I am certain, than you spend upon your overcoats." 

And here Mr. Hunt regarded Rossetti's garment, 
which was then aged thirty-three, and cost £6 los. 
when it was new. I did not, however, interrupt him, 
and the great man continued: 

**And you will observe that I still have the coat, 
which is worth as much, or more, than its original 
sum, while, for all these years, it has enabled me to 
present a flourishing appearance whenever I had to 
transact business." 

These are, of course, not Mr. Hunt's exact words, 
nor, perhaps, are the figures exactly right, but they 
render the effect of this dissertation. I never could 
understand why it was that, whenever I came near 
Mr. Hunt, he should always lecture me on the virtue 
of economy, yet this was the case. Nevertheless, in 
those days, following what I considered to be the 
rules of Morrisian socialism, I certainly dressed with 
an extreme economy, and I doubt whether all the 
clothes I had on could have cost so much as the £3 los. 
which Mr. Hunt allotted for a yearly expenditure on 

145 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

overcoats. There was Rossetti's garment, aged 
thirty- three; there was a water-tight German forest- 
er's pilot jacket which I had bought in the Bavarian 
Spessart for four and sixpence; there were some 
trousers which I imagine cost eighteen shilHngs; a 
leather belt; an old blue shirt, which, being made of 
excellent linen, had already served my grandfather 
for fifteen years, and a red satin tie which probably 
cost one shilling. But these facts, I imagine, were 
hidden from Mr. Hunt, who had no particular sym- 
pathy with the aesthetic movement or with advanced 
ideas. Mr. Holman Hunt, of course, was a Pre- 
Raphaelite of pure blood, and anything more hideous, 
anything more purely early Victorian, than in their day 
the Pre-Raphaelites put up with in the matter of 
furniture and appointments I do not think it possible 
to imagine. 

Holman Hunt and Millais separated themselves 
early from the other Pre-Raphaelites, and their fur- 
niture remained normal, following the fashions of 
the day. And this remained true for all the disciples 
of the first Pre-Raphaelite group. Thus, if you will 
look at Robert B. Martineau's "The Last Day in the 
Old Home," you will perceive a collection of the 
horrors of furnishing as it was understood in the days 
when Victoria was Queen — a collection rendered by 
the painter with a care so loving as to show that he 
at least had no idea of salvation having to be obtained 
by curtain serge and simplicity. 

146 



ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE 

The first impulses toward the new furnishing came 
when Rossetti acquired, during a visit to Oxford, two 
disciples called William Morris and Algernon Charles 
Swinburne. These two young men made Rossetti's 
acquaintance while he was painting the frescoes in the 
Union — frescoes which have now almost disappeared. 
Swinburne, and more particularly Morris, must have 
exercised the most profound of influences over Dante 
Gabriel, and later over Madox Brown. For I have 
no doubt whatever that it was these two who pushed 
this great figure into the exaggerated and loose med- 
iaevalism that distinguished his latest period. I do 
not mean to say that Rossetti had fallen under no 
mediaeval influences before this date, since obviously 
he had been enormously impressed by Sir Walter 
Scott. I used to possess a yellow-bound pamphlet 
entitled Sir Hugh the Heron, and printed by Rossetti's 
grandfather when Rossetti himself was seven or eight. 
Sir Hugh the Heron contained the following spirited 
verse, which always lingers in my memory: 

"And the shrieks of the flying, the groans of the dying, 
And the battle's deafening yell, 
And the armor which clanked as the warrior rose 
And rattled as he fell." 

This first-printed poem of Rossetti's has always 
seemed to me symbolical of what, by himself, he did 
for mediaevalism. Scott made it merely romantic; 
he suggested — I don't mean to say that he ever gave 

147 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

it as such — but he suggested that William Wallace 
went into battle in black velvet short hose, with in one 
hand a court sword and in the other a cambric pocket- 
handkerchief. Rossetti, before he came under the 
influence of Morris and Burne -Jones, went much 
deeper into mediaevalism than ever Scott did. He 
looked as it were into the illuminated capitals of missals 
and so gave the world little square wooden chambers 
all gilded with women in hennins, queer musical 
instruments, and many little, pretty quaint conceits. 
Madox Brown, of course, in his peculiar manner 
carried the quaintnesses still further. With his queer 
knotted English mind he must give you an Iseult 
screaming like any kitchen wench, a Sir Tristram 
expiring in an extraordinarily stifle spasm because 
armor would not bend, a King Mark poking a par- 
ticularly ugly face into a grated window, and, of all 
things in the world, a white Maltese terrier yapping 
at the murderers. This picture was, of course, de- 
signed to epater les bourgeois — touch them on the raw. 
And as such it need not be considered very seriously. 
But, between them, Madox Brown and Rossetti 
invented a queer and quaint sort of mediaevalism 
that was realistic always as long as it could be 
picturesque. Morris, Sw^inburne, and Burne- Jones, 
however, invented the gorgeous glamour of mediaeval- 
ism. It was as if they said they must have pome- 
granates, pomegranates, pomegranates all the way. 
They wanted pomegranates not only in their pictures, 

148 



ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE 

but in their dining-rooms and on their beds. I should 
say that Rossetti was a man without any principles 
at all, who earnestly desired to find some means of 
salvation along the lines of least resistance. Madox 
Brown, on the other hand, was ready to make a prin- 
ciple out of anything that was at all picturesque. 
Thus, while Rossetti accepted the pomegranate as the 
be-all and end-all of life, Madox Brown contented 
himself with playing with a conventionalized daisy 
pattern such as could grow behind any St. Michael 
or Uriel of stained glass. Neither Rossetti nor Madox 
Brown had the least desire to mediaevalize their homes. 
Rossetti wanted to fill his house with anything that 
was odd, Chinese, or sparkling. If there was some- 
thing grewsome about it, he liked it all the better. 
Thus, at his death, two marauders out of the shady 
crew that victimized him, and one honest man, each 
became possessed of the dark-lantern used by Eugene 
Aram. I mean to say that quite lately there were in 
the market three dark-lanterns, each of which was 
supposed to have come from Rossetti's house at his 
death, only one of which had been bought with honest 
money at Rossetti's sale. Even this one may not 
have been the relic of the murderer which Rossetti 
had purchased with immense delight. He bought, in 
fact, just anything or everything that amused him 
or tickled his fancy, without the least idea of making 
his house resemble anything but an old curiosity shop. 
This collection was rendered still more odd by the 

149 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

eccentricities of Mr. Charles Augustus Howell, an 
extraordinary personage who ought to have a volume 
all to himself. There was nothing in an odd jobbing 
way that Mr. Howell was not up to. He supported 
his family for some time by using a diving bell to 
recover treasure from a lost galleon off the coast of 
Portugal, of which country he appears to have been a 
native. He became Ruskin's secretary, and he had 
a shop in which he combined the framing and the 
forging of masterpieces. He conducted the most 
remarkable of dealers' swindles with the most con- 
summate ease and grace, doing it, indeed, so lovably 
that when his misdeeds were discovered he became 
only more beloved. Such a character would obviously 
appeal to Rossetti, and as, at one period of his career, 
Rossetti's income ran well into five figures, while he 
threw gold out of all the windows and doors, it is 
obvious that such a character as Rossetti's must have 
appealed very strongly to Mr. Charles Augustus 
Howell. The stories of him are endless. At one time, 
while Rossetti was collecting chinoiseries, Howell 
happened to have in his possession a nearly priceless 
set of Chinese tea things. These he promptly pro- 
ceeded to have duplicated at his establishment, where 
forging was carried on more wonderfully than seems 
possible. This forgery he proceeded to get one of his 
concealed agents to sell to Rossetti for an enormously 
high figure. Coming to tea with the poet-artist on the 
next day, he remarked to Rossetti: 

150 



ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE 

** Hello, Gabriel! where did you get those clumsy 
imitations ?" 

Rossetti, of course, was filled with consternation, 
whereupon Howell remarked comfortingly: "Oh, it's 
all right, old chap, I've got the originals, which I'll 
let you have for an old song." 

And, eventually, he sold the originals to Rossetti 
for a figure very considerably over that at which 
Rossetti had bought the forgeries. Howell was then 
permitted to take away the forgeries as of no value, 
and Rossetti was left with the originals. Howell, 
however, was for some time afterward more than 
usually assiduous in visiting the painter-poet. At 
each visit he brought one of the forged cups in his 
pocket, and while Rossetti's back was turned he 
substituted the forgery for one of the genuine cups, 
which he took away in his pocket. At the end of the 
series of visits, therefore, Rossetti once more possessed 
the copies and Howell the genuine set, which he sold, 
I believe, to M. Tissot. 

So that whatever Rossetti did possess he never 
could be really certain of what it actually was. He 
could not even, as I have elsewhere pointed out, be 
certain that the pictures on his own easels were by 
his own hand. But in any case he went through life 
with a singular collection of oddments, and the cata- 
logue of his effects at his death is one of the most 
romantic documents of the sort that it is easy to lay 
one's hands on. 

151 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

Madox Brown, on the other hand, had very much 
of Rossetti's passion for picking up things. But he 
cared very httle for the wares or the value of the 
objects which he purchased. He would buy black 
Wedgewood, or he would buy a three-penny pot at a 
little shop round the corner, or he would buy gilt 
objects from the palace of George IV. at Brighton — 
in short, he would buy anything that would add a 
spot of color to his dining-room. But I fancy the only 
bargain he ever made was once when he discovered 
a cartoon in red chalk among the debris of a rag-and- 
bone shop. For this he exchanged two old bonnets 
of my grandmother's. Some time afterward he ob- 
served — I think at Agnew's — another red-chalk 
cartoon which was an authenticated Boucher. This 
second cartoon was so obviously the other half of the 
design he had already in his possession that he had 
no hesitation in purchasing it for a comparatively 
small sum. At the sale of his effects, in 1894, this 
panel fetched quite a considerable price, and in the 
mean time it had looked very handsome upon the walls 
of his drawing-room. 

The Madox Brown sale, apart from its note of 
tragedy for myself in the breaking up of a home that 
had seemed so romantic — that still, after many years, 
seems to me so romantic — had about it something 
extremely comic. Madox Brown's rooms had always 
seemed to me to be as comfortable and as pretty as one 
could desire. It was true that they had about them 

152 



ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE 

no settled design. But of an evening, with many 
candles lit, the golden wallpaper shining with a sub- 
dued glow, the red curtains, the red couch, the fire- 
place with its turkey-red tiles, the large table covered 
with books, the little piano of a golden wood, with 
its panels painted and gilded by William Morris 
himself — all these things had about them a prettiness, 
a quaintness. And, with the coming of the auction- 
eer's man, it all fell to pieces so extraordinarily. 

I do not think I shall ever forget Madox Brown's 
quaint dismay and anger when Mr. Harry Quilter 
"discovered" him. During his long absence in 
Manchester while he was painting the twelve frescoes 
in the Town Hall — frescoes which were of great size, 
each of which occupied him a year and were paid for 
very insignificantly, the frescoes which the Manches- 
ter Town Council afterward desired to whitewash 
out — after this long absence from London Madox 
Brown as a painter and as a man had become entirely 
forgotten. So that, when he returned to London, he 
seemed to have almost no friends left, and no one 
to buy his pictures. The old race of Northern mer- 
chant princes who had bought so liberally were all 
dead, and shortly after his return he sold to Mr. 
Boddington, of Wilmslow, fourteen early pictures for 
four hundred pounds. Most of these were lately 
exhibited at the Dudley Gallery, where one of them 
sold for more than half the price that had been 
given for the fourteen. This picture is now, I believe, 

153 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

in the possession of Mr. Sargent. Nevertheless, in 
his rather dismal circumstances, Madox Brown set 
cheerfully to work to get together a new home and a 
new circle of friends. He went about it with a remark- 
able and boyish gayety, and, having got it together, 
with its gilt-leather wallpaper, its red tiles, its furni- 
ture from the palace of George IV. at Brighton, and 
its other oddments, he really considered that he had 
produced a sort of palace. Then came Mr. Quilter. 
Mr. Quilter discovered the phrase "Father of Pre- 
Raphaelism," which so disturbed Mr. Holman Hunt. 
He discovered that this great artist whom he compared 
to Titian, Botticelli, Holbein, Hogarth, and to Heaven 
knows whom, was living in our midst, and he pro- 
claimed this astounding discovery to one of the even- 
ing papers, with the additional circumstance that 
Madox Brown was living in a state of the most 
dismal poverty. He described Madox Brown's studio 
— the only room in the house to which he had been 
admitted — as a place so filled with old fragments 
of rusty iron, bits of string, and the detritus of ages 
that it resembled a farrier's shop. He described a lay 
figure with the straw sticking out of all its members, 
easels covered with dust that tottered and perpetually 
threatened to let their pictures fall, curtains so thread- 
bare that they were mere skeleton protections against 
the sun and draughts. In short, he described a place 
half-way between the Old Curiosity Shop of Dickens 
and a marine store in a suburb of Portsmouth. Madox 

154 



ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE 

Brown read this picturesque narrative with a face of 
exaggerated bewilderment. He pulled his biretta im- 
patiently off his snow-white head, and gazed over his 
spectacles at the bits of string, the fragments of old 
iron, the tottering easels, the lay figure, with straw 
sticking out of every joint, that, in an attitude of de- 
jection, hung from its supports like a man that has 
been executed three centuries before. With an air of 
extreme satisfaction he regarded all these objects 
which Mr. Quilter had so picturesquely and accurate- 
ly described. Then he put on his biretta once more 
with great care, and, speaking solemnly and deliber- 
ately, let fall the words: 

"God damn and blast my soul! What does the 
fellow want ?" 

Madox Brown had for long been away from Lon- 
don, and came of a generation of artists incomparably 
older in tradition than any that were then to be 
found alive — he, the erstwhile disciple of David, 
the pupil of Baron Wappers, who had had his first 
training at the hands of the Grand School, a whole 
of a lifetime before — Madox Brown had simply 
never heard that a studio was a place where, amid 
stuffed peacocks, to the tinkling of harmonious foun- 
tains falling into marble basins half hidden by 
orange-trees, beneath an alcove of beaten copper and 
with walls of shining porphyry, you sat about in a 
velvet coat and had eau-de- cologne squirted over 
your hair by a small black page. A studio for him 
11 155 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 



was a comfortable place that no housemaid dare 
enter, a place to which you retired to work, a place in 
which you treasured up every object you had ever 
painted, from a rusty iron candlestick to half a dozen 
horse's teeth — a place with a huge table on which 
stood all the objects and implements that you had ever 
used waiting amid tranquil rust and dust until it 
should be their turn again to come in handy. So that 
he could not for the Hfe of him imagine what it was 
Mr. Ouilter did want. He didn't, in fact, know what 
advertisement was. Mr. Quilter, on the other hand, 
had come across artists who mostly knew nothing else. 
In the matter of the studio they were thus at cross 
purposes. It wasn't a sign of poverty; it was just a 
symptom of an unbusiness-like career. 

Madox Brown, in fact, was the most unbusiness- 
like of men, and he had less sense of the value of 
money than any person I have ever met. He had, 
indeed, a positive genius for refusing to have anything 
to do with money that came at all easily. When my 
mother was granted a pension from the Civil List 
upon the death of my father, Madox Brown greeted the 
two gentlemen who rather timidly brought the news 
with such a torrent of violent and indignant refusals 
that one of them, poor, dear Mr. Hipkins, the most 
beloved of men, to whose efforts the allowance was 
mainly due, became indisposed and remained ill for 
some days afterward. Thus my mother never received 
a penny from her grateful country. A number of 

156 



ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE 

gentlemen, all of them artists, I believe, subscribed 
a considerable sum, amounting to several thousand 
pounds, in order to commission Madox Brown to paint 
a picture for presentation to the National Gallery. 
Such an honor, they very carefully pointed out, had 
been paid to no English painter with the exception 
of MacHse, though it was frequent enough in France. 
The ambassadors on this occasion approached Madox 
Brown with an almost unheard - of caution. For 
three days I was kept on the watch to discover 
the most propitious moment when my grandfather's 
humor after the passing away of a fit of the gout 
was at its very sunniest. I telegraphed to Mr. 
Frederick Shields, who came at his fastest in a hansom 
cab — a vehicle which I believe he detested. And 
then an extraordinary row raged in the house. Madox 
Brown insisted — as he had insisted in the case of my 
mother's pension — that it was all a plot on the part 
of the damned Academicians to humiliate him. He 
insisted that it was a confounded charity. He swore 
incessantly and perpetually, upset all the fire-irons, 
which Mr. Shields patiently and silently replaced. 
The contest raged for a long time; it continued 
through many days. I cannot imagine how Mr. Shields 
supported it, but, the most self-sacrificing of men, he 
triumphed in the end by insisting that it was an honor, 
an unprecedented honor. The four or five Academi- 
cians who had humbly begged to be allowed to share 
in the privilege of subscribing had each solemnly and 

157 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

separately mentioned the precedent of Maclise. In short, 
pale and exhausted, Mr. Shields triumphed, though 
my grandfather did not live to complete the picture. 

Of the many devoted friends that Madox Brown 
had I think that Mr. Shields w^as the most devoted 
and the best. Honored as he is as the painter of the 
mural decorations in the Chapel of Ease, near the 
Marble Arch — Sterne, by-the-bye, is buried in the 
graveyard behind the chapel, his tombstone having 
been provided by subscription of Freemasons, though 
I do not know whether this is the first honor of 
its kind ever paid to an author and a clergyman 
— I should still like to relate one fact which does 
much honor to this painter's heart, an honor which 
I believe is unshared and unequalled in the annals of 
painting. When Madox Brown, by the efforts of 
Mr. Shields and Mr. Charles Rowley, was, after 
many storms, commissioned to paint six of the panels 
in the great hall at Manchester, Mr. Shields, himself 
a native of that city, was nominated to paint the other 
six. He accepted the commission; it was signed, 
sealed, settled, and delivered. Madox Brown began 
upon his work; he finished one panel; he finished 
two; he finished three; the years rolled on. But Mr. 
Shields made no sign. And Manchester was in a 
hurry. They began to press Mr. Shields; Mr. Shields 
said nothing. They threatened him with injunctions 
from the Court of Chancery; they writted him, they 
began actions, being hot-headed and masculine men, 

158 



ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE 

for the specific performance of Mr. Shields's contract. 
All the while Mr. Shields lay absolutely low. At 
last, in despair of ever getting the town hall finished, 
the city of Manchester commissioned Madox Brown 
to complete the series of frescoes. This, again, was 
Mr. Shields's triumph. For, from the first, he had 
accepted the commission and he had remained silent 
through years of bullying, having in his mind all the 
time the design that the work should fall to my grand- 
father, whom he considered an absolutely great artist. 
Had he at first refused the commission it would have 
been taken by some painter less self-sacrificing. He 
took it, therefore, and bore the consequences, which 
were very troublesome. 

I was once walking with this fine gentleman when he 
became the subject of a street boy's remark which 
should not, I think, be lost to the world. That Mr. 
Shields is of this opinion I feel fairly certain, for I 
have many times heard him repeat the anecdote. A 
deeply religious man, Mr. Shields was, at the time of 
which I am writing, eminently patriarchal in appear- 
ance. His beard was of great length and his iron-gray 
hair depended well onto his shoulders. This attracted 
the attention of an extremely small boy who scarcely 
came up to the painter's knee. Both his eyes and 
mouth as round as three marbles, the child trotted 
along, gazing up into the artist's eyes, until he asked: 

"What is it, my little man .?" 

Then at last the boy answered: 

159 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

"Now I knows why it was the barber hung hisself!" 

Mr. Shields was not in any way embarrassed, but 
when I was extremely young and extremely self- 
conscious he once extremely embarrassed me. Being 
of this picturesque appearance, he was walking with 
myself and Mr. Harold Rathbone, the almost more 
picturesque originator of Delia Robbia ware pottery. 
This was a praiseworthy enterprise for the manufac- 
ture among other things of beautiful milk-jugs, which, 
at ten and sixpence apiece, Mr. Rathbone considered 
would be so handy for the Lancashire mill girls when 
they went on a day's outing in the country. We were 
in the most crowded part of Piccadilly; the eyes of Eu- 
rope seemed to be already more than sufficiently upon 
us to suit my taste. Mr. Rathbone suddenly an- 
nounced that he had succeeded in persuading the 
Liverpool corporation to buy Mr. Holman Hunt's 
picture of "The Triumph of the Innocents." Mr. 
Shields stopped dramatically. His eyes became as 
large and round as those of the street child: 

"You have^ Harold!" he exclaimed, and opening 
his arms wide he cried out, "Let me kiss you, Harold!" 

The two artists, their Inverness capes flying out and 
seeming to cover the whole of Piccadilly, fell into each 
other's arms. As for me, I ran away at the top of my 
speed and hid myself in the gloomy entrance under the 
steps of the orchestra at the back of St. James's Hall. 
But I wish now I could again witness an incident 
arising from another such occasion. 

i6o 



VIII 

VARIOUS CONSPIRATORS 

THE earliest Pre-Raphaelites bothered themselves 
very Httle, therefore, with poHtics, Rossetti him- 
self less than any of the others, though most of the 
Rossettis had always views of an advanced char- 
acter. How could it be otherwise with Italians whose 
earliest ideas were centred around the struggle for 
Italian freedom ? It has always seemed to me a curious 
conjunction that Napoleon III., when he was a pauper 
exile in London, was a frequent visitor at the little 
house in Charlotte Street where the Rossettis lived in 
an odor of Italian conspiracy. And it has sometimes 
occurred to me to wonder whether the germs of 
Napoleon's later policy — that Utopian and tremendous 
idea that was his of uniting all Latin humanity in one 
immense alliance under the aegis and hegemony of 
the eagle of France; that tremendous idea that, ap- 
pearing amid the smoke of Solferino and Sadowa, 
fell so tragically upon the field of Sedan — whether 
that idea did not find its birth in the little room where 
Rossetti, the father, sat and talked continuously of 
Dante and of Italia una. 

i6i 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

I remember hearing an anecdote concerning Maz- 
zini that has nothing to do with Pre-RaphaeHtes, but 
it is one that amuses me. In the time of Mazzini's 
exile in London he was in circumstances of extreme 
poverty. One of the sympathizers with the cause of 
the Hberation of Italy allowed the refugee to live in 
the attic of his office. He was a Mr. Shaen, a solicitor 
of distinction, and his offices were naturally in Bed- 
ford Row. He rented the whole house, but used only 
the lower rooms. 

Years passed; Mazzini went away, died, and was 
enshrined in the hearts of his liberated countrymen. 
More years passed; Mr. Shaen died; the firm which 
Mr. Shaen founded grew larger and larger. The 
clerks invaded room after room of the upper house, 
until at last they worked in the very attics. One day 
one of the partners was dictating a difficult letter to a 
clerk in such an attic. He stood before the fire and 
absent-mindedly fingered a dusty, spherical object of 
iron that stood upon the mantelpiece. Getting hold 
of the phrase that he wanted, he threw, still absent- 
mindedly, this iron object into the fire. He finished 
dictating the letter and left the room. Immediately 
afterward there was a terrific explosion. The round 
object was nothing more nor less than a small bomb. 

With such objects Mazzini had passed his time 
while, years before, he had dreamed of the liberation 
of Italy. He had gone away; the bomb, forgotten 
upon the mantelpiece, had remained undisturbed until 

162 



VARIOUS CONSPIRATORS 

at last it found its predestined billet in the maiming 
of several poor clerks. I do not know that there is 
any particular moral to this story. It certainly does 
not bear upon what was certainly the great moral 
of the Pre-Raphaelites, as of the aesthetes. It is true 
that this great moral is nothing more nor less than the 
mediaeval proverb: "Let the cobbler stick to his last." 

Indeed, it was in exactly those words that my 
grandfather replied to O'Connell when that ardent 
champion of the cause of United Ireland requested 
Madox Brown, Rossetti, and Holman Hunt to 
stand for Irish constituencies. O'Connell's idea 
was that, if the cause of Ireland could be repre- 
sented in the House of Commons by Englishmen of 
distinction in the world of arts and intellect, the cause 
of Ireland would become much more acceptable in 
English eyes. In this he was probably wrong, for 
England has a rooted distrust for any practitioner 
of the arts. Rossetti, in any case, replied that his 
health would not allow him to go through the excite- 
ment of a parliamentary election. 

This was probably true, for at the time Rossetti 
was at the lowest pitch of his nervous malady. Madox 
Brown, however, answered in a full-dress letter, which 
was exceedingly characteristic of him. He refused 
emphatically to stand, while pointing out that his 
entire heart went out to the cause of Ireland, that he 
sympathized with all uprisings, moonlightings, boy- 
cottings, and any other cheerful form of outrage. 

163 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

This was Madox Brown, the romantic! Immediately 
afterward, however, he got to business with those 
words: "Let the cobbler stick to his last." 

He continued that the affairs of Ireland were ex- 
ceedingly complicated, that in Ireland itself were 
many factions, each declaring that the other would 
be the ruin of the nation, and that he had to pay too 
much attention to his brushes and paints ever to 
tackle so thorny a question. He sympathized entirely 
with freedom in all its forms, he was ready to vote 
for Home Rule and to subscribe to the funds of all the 
Irish parties, but he felt that his was not the brain of a 
practical politician. What Mr. Holman Hunt wrote 
I do not precisely remember, though I have seen his 
letter. It put — as it naturally would — Madox 
Brown's views in language much more forcible and 
much less polite. 

And, indeed, until William Morris dragged across 
the way of aestheticism the red herring of socialism, 
the Pre-Raphaelites, the aesthetes, painters, poets, 
painter-poets, and all the inhabitants of the drawing- 
rooms that Du Maurier illustrated in Punch — all this 
little earnest or posing world — considered itself as a 
hierarchy, as an aristocracy entirely aloof from the 
common sort. 

It lived under the sanction of the arts, and from 
them it had alike its placidity and its holiness. When 
poor Oscar Wilde wandered down Bond Street in parti- 
colored velvet hose, holding a single red flower in his 

164 



VARIOUS CONSPIRATORS 

hand, he was doing what in those days was called 
"touching the Philistine on the raw." In France 
this was called epater le bourgeois. Maxime dii Camp, 
whom I have always considered the most odious and 
belittling of memoirists — who has told us that, but 
for his illness, Flaubert would have been a man of 
genius — this Du Camp does, in his carping way, give 
us a picture of a sort of society which, in many ways, 
resembled that of the aesthetes toward the end of the 
last century. In Flaubert, Gautier, even in Merimee, 
and in a half-score of French writers just before the 
fall of the second empire, there was this immense 
feeling of the priesthood of the arts. I do not mean 
to say that it was limited to the coterie that surrounded 
Flaubert. Victor Hugo had it; and even Alexandre 
Dumas qui ecrivait comme un cocher de fiacre. Du 
Camp, the whole of whose admiration was given to 
the author of Monte Cristo, ought by rights to have 
been an English critic. 

Indeed, it was only yesterday that I read in my daily 
paper an article by the literary critic who to-day is 
most respected by the British middle classes. Said 
this gentleman: "Thank Heaven that the day of 
Flaubert and the realists is passed for England, and 
that the market is given over to writers of the stamp 
of Mr. A. — to writers who, troubling their heads 
nothing at all about the subtleties of art, set them- 
selves the task of writing a readable story without 
bothering about the words in which it is written." 

165 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

These words might well have been written by 
ce cher Maxime! The same English writer, in re- 
viewing the Memoirs of Mme. de Boigne, goes out of 
his way to poke fun at the duchess who surrounded 
Chateaubriand with an atmosphere of adoration. 

This seemed ridiculous to Mr. . It would not have 

seemed ridiculous to Du Camp. 

But be these matters how they may, it is pretty 
certain that, outside this aesthetic circle, we have 
never had in England any body of people, whether 
artists or laity, who realized that art was a thing that 
it was in the least worth putting one's self out for, and 
when Oscar Wilde wandered down Bond Street in a 
mediaeval costume, bearing in his hand a flower, he 
was doing something not merely ridiculous. It was 
militant. 

Wilde himself I met only in his later years. I 
remember being at a garden party of the Bishop of 
London, and hearing behind me a conversation so 
indelicate that I could not resist turning around. 
Oscar Wilde, very fat, with the remainder of young 
handsomeness — even of young beauty — was talking 
to a lady. It would be more precise to say that the 
lady was talking to Wilde, for it was certainly she who 
supplied the indelicacies in their conversation, for, 
as I knew Wilde, he had a singularly cleanly tongue. 

But I found him exceedingly difficult to talk to, 
and I only once remember hearing him utter one of his 
brilliancies. This was at a private view of the New 

i66 



VARIOUS CONSPIRATORS 

Gallery. Some one asked Wilde if he were not going 
to the soiree of the O. P. Club. Wilde, who at that 
time had embroiled himself with that organization, 
replied: "No. Why, I should be like a poor lion in 
a den of savage Daniels." 

I saw him once or twice afterward in Paris, where he 
was, I think, rather shamefully treated by the younger 
denizens of Montmartre and of the Quartier Latin. 
I remember him as, indeed, a tragic figure, seated at 
a table in a" little cabaret, lachrymosely drunk, and 
being tormented by an abominable gang of young 
students of the four arts. 

Wilde possessed a walking-stick with an ivory head, 
to which he attached much affection — and, indeed, 
in his then miserable poverty, it was an object of con- 
siderable intrinsic value. ProwHng about the same 
cabaret was one of those miserable wrecks of human- 
ity, a harmless, parasitic imbecile, called Bibi Latouche. 
The young students were engaged in persuading poor 
Wilde that this imbecile was a dangerous malefactor. 
Bibi was supposed to have taken a fancy to Wilde's 
walking-stick, and the young men were engaged in 
persuading the poet that, if he did not surrender 
this treasure, he would be murdered on his way home 
through the lonely streets. Wilde cried and pro- 
tested. 

I do not know that I acted any heroic part in the 
matter. I was so disgusted that I went straight out 
of the cafe, permanently cured of any taste for Bohe- 

167 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

mianism that I may ever have possessed. Indeed, I 
have never since been able to see a student, with his 
blue beret, his floating cloak, his floating tie, and his 
youthful beard, without a feeling of aversion. 

One of Wilde's French intimates of that date 
assured me, and repeated with the utmost earnest- 
ness and many asservations, that he was sure Wilde 
only sinned par pure stiobisme, and in order to touch 
the Philistine on the raw. Of this I am pretty well 
satisfied, just as I am certain that such a trial as that 
of Wilde was a lamentable error of public policy on 
the part of the police. He should have been given 
his warning, and have been allowed to escape across 
the Channel. That any earthly good could come of 
the trial no one, I think, would be so rash as to ad- 
vance. I did not like Wilde; his works seemed to me 
derivative and of no importance, his humor thin 
and mechanical, and I am lost in amazement at the 
fact that in Germany and to some extent in France 
Wilde should be considered a writer of enormous 
worth. Nevertheless, I cannot help thinking that 
his fate was infinitely more bitter than anything he 
could have deserved. As a scholar he was worthy 
of the greatest respect. His conversation, though it 
did not appeal to me, gave, as I can well believe, 
immense pleasure to innumerable persons; so did 
his plays, so did his verse. Into his extravagances he 
was pushed by the quality of his admirers, who de- 
manded always more and more follies; when they 

1 68 



VARIOUS CONSPIRATORS 

had pushed him to his fall, they very shamefully 
deserted this notable man. 

On the afternoon when the sentence against Wilde 
had been pronounced I met Dr. Garnett on the steps 
of the British Museum. He said gravely: "This is 
the death-blow to English poetry." I looked at him 
in amazement, and he continued: "The only poets 
we have are the Pre-Raphaelites, and this will cast 
so much odium upon them that the habit of reading 
poetry will die out in England." 

I was so astonished that I laughed out loud. I had 
hardly imagined that Wilde could be called a Pre-Ra- 
phaelite at all. Indeed, it was only because of the con- 
fusion that existed between Pre-Raphaelism and Ms- 
theticism that the name ever became attached to this 
group of poets. Pre-Raphaelism as it existed in the 
forties and fifties was a sort of realism inspired by 
high moral purpose, 

.^stheticism, which originated with Burne - Jones 
and Morris, was a movement that concerned itself 
with idealizing anything that was mediaeval. It may 
be symbolized by the words, ''long necks and pome- 
granates." Wilde carried this ideal one stage further. 
He desired to live upon the smell of a lily. I do not 
know that he ever did, but I know that he was in the 
habit of sending to young ladies whom he admired 
a single lily flower, carefully packed in cotton-wool. 
And the cry from the austere realism of my grand- 
father's picture of "Work," or Holman Hunt's "Sav- 

169 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

iour in the Temple," was so far that I may well be 
pardoned for not recognizing Wilde at all under the 
mantle of a soi disant Pre-Raphaelite. 

But, looking back, I recognize how true Dr. Gar- 
nett's words were. For certainly at about that date 
English poetry died. It is really extraordinary the 
difference that has arisen between those days and now 
— a matter of not twenty years. 

The literary life of London of the early nineteenth 
century was extraordinarily alive and extraordinarily 
vivid. To be a writer then was to be something 
monumental. I remember almost losing my breath 
with joy and astonishment when Mr. Zangwill once, 
in a railway carriage, handed me a cigarette; to have 
spoken to Mr. William Watson was as glorious a thing 
as to have spoken to Napoleon the Great. In those 
days writers were interviewed; their houses, their 
writing-desks, their very blotting pads were photo- 
graphed for the weekly papers. Their cats, even, 
were immortalized by the weekly press. Think of 
that now! 

But when Swinburne died — to our lasting shame — 
we did not even bury him in Westminster Abbey. 
To our lasting shame, I say, for Swinburne was, 
without exception, the best known Englishman in the 
world. I do not think that it was the trial of Wilde 
that alone brought this about. Two other factors 
conduced. 

In the glorious nineties Mr. John Lane and Mr. 

170 



VARIOUS CONSPIRATORS 

Elkin Mathews founded a romantic and wonderful 
publishing business. This was called the Bodley Head. 
It attracted all the young poets of the nest of singing 
birds that England then was. There never was such 
an excitement. 

Little volumes of poems were published in a limited 
edition, and forty, fifty, or sixty pounds would be 
paid at auction for a single copy. There appeared 
to be no end to it, and then the end came. I do 
not know why Mr. Lane and Mr. Mathews parted; 
I do not know why the Bodley Head died down. 
No doubt the fate of Wilde had a great deal to 
do with it. Probably the public, with its singular 
and muddle-headed perspicacity, inseparably con- 
nected in its mind the idea of poetry with ideas of vice. 
I do not know. At any rate, all these glories died 
away as utterly as the radiance is said to vanish from 
the dying flying-fish. 

And then came the Boer War, which appears to me 
like a chasm separating the new world from the old. 
Since that period the whole tone of England appears 
to me to have entirely changed. Principles have died 
out of politics, even as the spirit of artistry has died 
out among the practitioners of the arts. 

I remember talking to a distinguished Tory thinker 
some time ago as to the dominant personalities of the 
present political world. I mentioned the Chancellor 
of the Exchequer. 

"Ah," said my friend, "that is a man. We ought 
12 171 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

to have had him to do our dirty work. We can never 
get along without some one of the sort. We had 
Disraeli; we had Chamberlain. We ought to have 
had Lloyd George." Think of that! 

As it is in the political world, so in the artistic. I 
do not mean to say that the Pre-Raphaelites were any 
very great shakes. But they cared intensely about 
their work; they talked about it and about little else. 
They regarded themselves, indeed, as priests. And 
without some such beliefs, how can an artist be 
hardened to do good work ^ There is no being so 
solitary, there is no being with so little power of 
gauging where he stands in the estimation of the 
world, 

I — and when I write " I " I mean every writer who 
ever used a hyphen — am told sometimes that I am 
the finest — or, let us say, the most precious — stylist 
now employing the English language. That may be 
so or it may not. What means have I of knowing ^ 
For the very paper which says that such and such a 
work of mine is the finest of the sort that was ever 

written will say to-morrow that a book by Miss 

is a work almost inconceivably fine — the finest thing 
since Shakespeare; and this is constantly happening 
to me. 

A weekly paper last year wrote of one of my books: 
"This is undoubtedly the finest historical novel that 
has appeared since the days of Scott." Next week, 
in the same column, written by the same hand, there 

172 



VARIOUS CONSPIRATORS 

appeared the review of a novel by a female connection 
of the critic. "This," he said, "is undoubtedly the 
finest historical novel that has appeared since the 
days of Scott," Where, then, do I stand, or to whom 
shall I go to find out ? Is it to my sales ? They are 
satisfactory, but they might be larger. Is it to my 
publisher ? He will inevitably tell me — and every 
writer who ever used a hyphen — that he loses money 
over my books. 

It is twenty years since I published my first novel, 
and every year or so since then the publisher of that 
early work has written to tell me that he lost one 
hundred pounds by that book, and why will I not give 
him another ? And I ask myself why — if this gentle- 
man once lost so largely over me — ^why does he wish 
to publish me again ? Or why should any one wish 
to publish my work ? Yet I have never written a line 
that has not been published. 

This, of course, is only the fortune of war; but 
what strikes me as remarkable was that my grand- 
father was as anxious to embark me upon an artistic 
career as most parents are to prevent their children 
from entering into a life that, as a rule, is so pre- 
carious. 

My father's last words to me were: "Fordie, 
whatever you do, never write a book." Indeed, so 
little idea had I of meddling with the arts that, al- 
though to me a writer was a very wonderful person, 
I prepared myself very strenuously for the Indian 

173 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

civil service. This was a real grief to my grandfather, 
and I think he was exceedingly overjoyed when the 
doctors refused to pass me for that service on the 
ground that I had an enlarged liver. And when, 
then, I seriously proposed to go into an office, his 
wrath became tempestuous. 

Tearing off his nightcap — for he happened at the 
time to be in bed with a bad attack of gout — he flung 
it to the other end of the room. 

"God damn and blast my soul!" he exclaimed. 
"Isn't it enough that you escaped providentially from 
being one kind of a cursed clerk, but you want to go 
and be another ? I tell you, I will turn you straight 
out of my house if you go in for any kind of com- 
mercial life." So that my fate was settled for me. 



IX 

POETS AND PRESSES 

T THINK that there is no crime — literary or con- 
' nected with literature — that nowadays an average, 
fairly honest English writer will not commit for the 
sake of a little money. He will lengthen his book 
to suit one publisher; he will cut it down to suit 
another. Nay, men otherwise honorable and trust- 
worthy will, for the matter of that, perjure them- 
selves in the most incredible manner as to financial 
arrangements they may have come to, or in the 
most cold-blooded style will break contracts and 
ignore obligations. I suppose that never before was 
the financial struggle among the literary classes so 
embittered and so ignoble. The actual circum- 
stances of literary life may have been more humiliating 
in the days when Johnson waited upon the patron 
that he never found. Hazlitt and the English essayists 
who seem to have existed in an atmosphere of tallow 
candles and porter, and to have passed their days in 
low pot-houses, may have been actually worse off 
than writers of their rank would be to-day. Hood 
starved, Douglas Jerrold, Hannay, or Angus B. Riach ' 

'75 'Reac^ 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

led existences of extreme squalor with spirits of the 
most high. And, indeed, disagreeable as Bohemian- 
ism seems to me, the somewhat squalid lives of writers 
and artists of the forties and fifties had about them 
something much more manly, and even a little more 
romantic, than is to be found in the literary life of 
to-day. I do not know that the artist of the forties 
troubled himself much about social position. Cruik- 
shank was violently angry when Maclise, in his won- 
■^ ^ derful series of pen-and-ink portraits in Eraser s 
Magazine^ gave to the world a likeness of the im- 
mortalizer of Pickwick sitting upon a barrel in a 
boozing-ken, his sketch-block held before him, while 
his keen and restless eyes surveyed what the commen- 
tator in the text calls "This scene of tumult and 
crime." Mr. Cruikshank wrote indignantly to declare 
that it was shameful to pillorize him forever as sitting 
in such low haunts. He wished to say that he was as 
good a gentleman as the Duke of Wellington, and 
passed his days as a gentleman should. And, indeed, 
I dimly remember being taken to call at Cruikshank's 
home in Mornington Crescent — though Cruikshank 
himself must have been long dead — and seeing there 
such Nottingham lace curtains, pieces of brain-coral, 
daguerreotypes, silhouettes, and engravings after 
Cruikshank as would have been found in any middle- 
class home of early and mid-Victorian days. One of 
the principal of these engravings was the immense 
caricature that Cruikshank made for the Good 

176 





v^ 


w. 




t. 




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>^' 


^ 


> 


y 


h-1 


.^ > 






X 






^ 


i 


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POETS AND PRESSES 



Templars. This represented, upon one hand, the 
prosperous and whiskered satisfaction that falls 
to a man who has led a teetotal existence, and, in 
many terrible forms, what would happen to you if 
you indulged in any kind of alcoholic beverage. 

Dickens avowed quite frankly and creditably his 
desire to have footmen in purple velvet small-clothes 
to hang behind his carriage, and Thackeray was never 
quite easy as to his social position. But, on the other 
hand, there was, as a general rule, very little thought 
about these matters. You earned very little, so you 
sat in a pot-house because you could not afford a club. 
And you got through life somehow without much troub- 
ling to make yourself of importance by meddling in 
politics. Thus, for instance, there was my grand- 
father's cousin, Tristram Madox, who, being along 
with James Hannay, a midshipman, was, along with 
him, cashiered and turned out of the Service for 
breaking leave and going ashore at Malta and "vio- 
lently assaulting Mr. Peter Parker, Tobacconist." 
Tristram Madox ran through several subsequent 
fortunes, and ended by living on ten shillings a week 
that were regularly sent him by Madox Brown. This 
allowance was continued for many years — twenty or 
thirty, I should think. One day it occurred to Madox 
Brown that he would like some news of his poor 
relation. I was accordingly sent down to the squalid 
cottage in a suburb of Ramsgate,to which for so many 
years the weekly postal orders had been addressed. 

177 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

Upon my mentioning the name of Madox, consterna- 
tion fell upon a pale-faced household. Tristram 
Madox had been dead ten years; in the interval 
the cottage had changed hands twice, but the incoming 
tenants had always accepted gratefully the weekly 
ten shillings that fell upon them from they knew not 
where. 

Hannay, on the other hand — presumably because 
he had no fortunes to run through — adopted the life 
of a man of letters. He wrote one sufficiently bad 
novel, called Eustace Conyers, and lived that life 
which always seemed to lie beneath the shadow of the 
King's Bench Prison. I never heard my grandfather 
say much that was particularly illuminating about 
this group of men; though his cousin took him very 
frequently into their society. Their humor seems to 
have been brutal and personal, but only a bludgeon 
would suppress it. Thus, when Tristram Madox 
was talking about one of his distinguished ancestors 
of the tenth century, Douglas Jerrold shut him up 
by saying, "I know! The man who was hanged for 
sheep-stealing." Or, again, when Douglas Jerrold 
was uttering a flood of brilliant witticisms, a very 
drunken woman who had been asleep with her head 
upon the table opposite Jerrold shut him up by 
raising a bleared face and exclaiming: 

*'You are a bloody fool." 

Nothing else would have shut Jerrold up. But I 
never heard my grandfather say that it was repre- 

178 




DOUGLAS JERROLD 



POETS AND PRESSES 



hensible or remarkable that they should sit in low 
pot-houses, or even that he should go there to meet 
them. They could not afford anything better; so 
they took what they could get. As for the social revolu- 
tion, they never talked about it, and, although Dickens 
wrote Oliver Twist and Bleak House ^ it was done 
with a warm-hearted enthusiasm, and the last thing 
that he would have considered himself was a theoretic 
social reformer. Between this insouciance and the 
uneasy social self-consciousness of the present - day 
literary man there arose for a short time the priestly 
pride, as you might call it, of the Pre-Raphaelites. 

These people undoubtedly regarded themselves as 
a close aristocracy. They produced works of art 
of one kind or another, and no one who did not pro- 
duce works of art counted. The laity, in fact, might 
not have existed at all. Indeed, even the learned and 
professional classes were not excluded from the gen- 
eral contempt. An Oxford don was regarded as a 
foolish, useless, and academic person, and my grand- 
father would say, for instance, of a doctor: "Oh, 
those fellows have nothing better to do than to wash 
their hands twelve times a day." It never, I think, 
entered his head to inquire why a doctor so frequently 
washed his hands. He regarded it as a kind of fop- 
pishness. And I can well remember that I entirely 
shared his point of view. So that to speak to any one 
who made money by commercial pursuits was almost 
not to speak to a man at all. It was as if one were 

179 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

communicating with one of the lower animals endowed 
with power of speech. 

And to a certain extent the pubHc of those days 
acquiesced. From the eadiest mediaeval times until 
toward the end of the nineteenth century there has 
always been vaguely in the public mind the idea that 
the man of letters was a sort of necromancer — as it 
were a black priest. In the dark ages almost the only 
poet that was known to man was the author of the 
/Etreid. I do not suppose that many men had read 
this epic. But all men had heard of its author. Was 
not his fame world-wide ? Was he not Duke Virgil 
of Mantua ^ Did he not build the city of Venice 
upon an egg ? Yes, surely he indeed was the greatest 
of all magicians. He left behind him his books of 
magic. If you took a pin and stuck it into one of these 
books, the line that it hit upon predicted infallibly 
what would be the outcome of any enterprise upon 
which you were engaged. These were the Sortes 
Virgiliance. Similarly, any one who could write or 
was engaged with books was regarded as a necro- 
mancer. Did he not have strange knowledges .? Thus 
you had Friar Bacon, Friar Bungay, or Dr. Faustus. 
The writer remained thus for centuries something 
mysterious, some one possessing those strange knowl- 
edges. For various classes, by the time of Johnson 
his mystery has gradually been whittled dow^n. The 
aristocracy, in the shape of patrons, came to regard 
him as a miserable creature, something between a 

i8o 



POETS AND PRESSES 



parasite and a pimp. To his personal tradesman he 
was also a miserable creature who did not pay his 
bills and starved in a garret. By the nineteenth 
century the idea that he was a sort of rogue and 
vagabond had spread pretty well throughout the 
land. A middle-class father was horrified when his 
daughter proposed to marry an artist or a writer. 
These people were notorious for marital infidelities 
and for the precariousness of their sources of live- 
lihood. Nevertheless a sort of mysterious sanctity 
attached to their produce. There can hardly have 
been a single middle-class household that did not 
have upon its drawing-room table one or two copies 
of books by Mr. Ruskin. I remember very well 
being consulted by a prosperous city merchant as 
to what books he should take with him upon a 
sea voyage. I gave him my views, to which he paid 
no attention. He took with him Sesame and Lilies ^ 
Notes Upon Sheepfoldsy Carlyle's Life of Frederick 
the Great, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and Swin- 
burne's Atalanta. With this singular library my 
portly friend set sail. He had not the slightest idea 
of what any of these books might be about, but he 
said, "Ah! they'll do me a great deal of good." As if, 
in his cabin, these volumes would act as a spiritual 
lifebuoy and float him, supposing the ship should 
founder, if not to land, at least to heaven. That was 
the trace of the old necromantic idea that something 
mysterious attached to the mere possession of books. 

i8i 



MEMORIES AND I IMPRESSIONS 



But the same gentleman would introduce a writer to 
his friends with a sort of apologetic cough, rather as 
if he had been found in the company of a prostitute; 
and when revelations of Carlyle's domestic misfor- 
tunes were published he manifested a calm satisfac- 
tion. He had always suspected that there must be 
something wrong because Carlyle was an author. 
But he still expected that his soul was saved because 
he possessed the Life of Frederick the Great. 

Thus in the seventies and eighties things were at a 
very satisfactory pass. Artists regarded themselves 
as an aristocracy set apart and walled off. The rest 
of the world regarded them as dangerous beings 
producing mysterious but, upon the whole, salutary 
works. There was no mixin}? and there was no desire 
to mix. As far as the arts were concerned there was 
in those days a state of affairs very much such as has 
subsisted in France since the time of the French 
Revolution. It is true that in France somewhat more 
social importance attaches to the man of letters. 
That is largely because of the existence of the French 
Academy. At the time when there is a vacancy in 
the ranks of the Immortal Forty you may observe a 
real stir in what is known as All Paris. Duchesses 
get out their carriages and drive candidates round 
to pay their calls upon the electors; nay, duchesses 
themselves canvass energetically in favor of the par- 
ticular master whose claims they favor, and the 
inaugural speech of an elected Academician is a social 

182 



POETS AND PRESSES 



function more eagerly desired than were the drawing- 
rooms of her late Majesty Victoria. But otherwise, 
the worlds of letters and of arts mix comparatively 
little with commercial society in France. 

And this has always seemed to me to be a com- 
paratively desirable frame of mind for the practitioner 
of the arts to adopt. For, unless he do consider himself 
— rightly or wrongly — as something apart, he must 
rapidly lose all sense of the dignity of his avocation. 
He will find himself universally regarded no longer, 
perhaps, as anything so important as a dangerous 
rogue and vagabond, but as something socially 
negligible. And all respect for literature as literature 
he will find to have died out utterly and forever. 

Flaubert was obsessed by the idea that literature 
was a thing hated by the bourgeoisie; that was the 
dominant idea of his life. And in his day I think he 
was right. That is to say that the common man 
hated violently any new literary form that was vital, 
unusual, and original. Thus Flaubert came to sit 
upon the criminal's bench after the publication of 
Madame Bovary. But nowadays, and in England, 
we have a singular and chilling indiff'erence to all 
literature. Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante might 
all put out their works to-day — for all I know, writers 
as great may actually be among us — and the actual 
effects of their publishing would be practically nothing. 
It is all very well to say that the press is responsible 
for this state of affairs. We have a press in England 

183 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

that is, upon the whole, of the lowest calibre of any 
in the civilized w^orld — I am, of course, speaking in 
terms intellectual, for our news organization is as 
good as it could be. But from the point of view 
of criticism of any kind, whether of the fine arts, 
of letters, of music, or of life itself, all but the very 
best of our newspapers of to-day would disgrace a 
fourth-class provincial town of France or Germany. 
And this is a purely commercial matter. When I 
was conducting a certain publication I was rung up 
upon the telephone by the advertising managers of 
two of the largest and most respectable daily news- 
papers. The first one told me that if I would take 
a six-inch double column in his literary supplement 
once a week he would undertake that a favorable 
notice of my publication should appear in his organ 
side by side with the advertisement. The advertising 
manager asked me peremptorily why I had not adver- 
tised in his columns. I replied that it was because I 
disapproved very strongly of a certain action to which 
his newspaper had committed itself. 

"Very well, then," he said; "you quite understand 
that no notice of your periodical will be taken in our 
literary columns." 

I am bound to say that this gentleman was merely 
"bluffing," and that quite impartial notices of my 
publication did appear in his paper. Indeed, I should 
imagine that the literary editor of the journal in ques- 
tion never spoke to an advertising manager. But just 

184 



POETS AND PRESSES 



think of the state of affairs — though it was only a 
matter of bluff — when such a threat could be made! 
I do not mean to say that there is any very actual or 
overt corruption in the London press of to-day; but 
the hunt for advertisements is a bitter and unscru- 
pulous struggle. Advertisement canvassers are — or, at 
any rate, I have found them so — men entirely without 
scruples, and the editorial departments of newspapers 
are thoroughly slack in the supervision of their repre- 
sentatives. The advertisement canvasser will come 
into the editorial office and will say to the literary 
editor in a friendly but slightly complaining manner 
(I have heard this speech myself): 

"Look here, Messrs. So-and-So say that they have 
spent forty pounds a week with us for the last three 
months and that you never give their books any space 
at all. Couldn't you see that they have a mention 
now and then ?" 

The literary editor, knowing perfectly well — or 
feehng subconsciously — that his position as editor, or 
perhaps even the very existence of his literary supple- 
ment, depends upon its power to attract advertise- 
ments, will almost certainly look out for something 
among the works published by Messrs. So-and-So 
and will then praise this work to the extent of a column 
or so. He will not always do this out of fear. Some- 
times it will be because he desires to help the poor 
devil of an advertisement canvasser who has a wife 
and family. Sometimes he will do it to oblige the 

185 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

publisher, who may be the best of good fellows. But 
always inevitably the result will be the same. And, 
armed with this achievement, the advertising can- 
vasser will go round to other publishers and assure 
them that, if they will spend money on advertisements 
in his paper, he will secure for them favorable notices 
upon the day when the advertisement appears. All 
this is very natural, a slow and imperceptibly spreading 
process of corruption. But it is bitterly bad for liter- 
ature. Twenty-five years ago it would have been 
impossible, fifteen years ago it would have been im- 
possible. Now, it is. There are exceptions, of 
course, but every day they grow fewer. The fine old 
newspaper whose advertisement manager proposed 
that I should give him every Thursday a six -inch 
double column, and receive in exchange my favorable 
notice — this fine old newspaper had just a week before 
passed into new hands! And nowadays, alas! almost 
invariably new brooms sweep very dirty! Cataclysmic 
and extraordinary changes take place every day in 
the world of newspapers. In one week two years ago 
I received visits from just over forty beggars. Every 
one of these introduced himself to my favor with 
the words: "I am a journalist myself." One of 
these poor men had a really tragic history. He 
bore a name of some respectability in the journal- 
istic world. He had been a reporter upon a midland 
daily paper; he had become the editor of a Southwest 
local journal. One day he was riding a bicycle outside 

i86 



POETS AND PRESSES 



his town, when a motor-car approached him from be- 
hind, knocked him down, and as he lay on the ground 
spread-eagled it ran over both his legs and both his 
arms and broke them. The car went on without 
stopping, and this poor man lay for eighteen months 
in a hospital. When he came out he was penniless, 
and he found that the whole face of journalism had 
altered. The midland paper for which he had written 
had passed into the hands of Lord Dash, and the 
entire staff had changed; his south-coast local paper 
had passed out of existence; so had the great London 
morning paper for which he had occasionally written. 
In another newspaper office with which he had been 
connected he found two editors, each properly engaged 
quarrelling as to who should occupy the editorial 
chair, and neither one of these had been the editor 
of the paper when he had gone into the hospital. In 
the short space of eighteen months all the men he 
knew had lost their jobs and had disappeared from 
Fleet Street. That is why one will receive visits from 
forty beggars in one week, each of them introducing 
himself with the w^ords: "I am a journalist myself." 

It is this terrible insecurity of tenure that has so 
brought low — that is so bringing low — the journalism 
of England. And it is not so much the fact that the 
majority of our journals are written by shop-boys for 
shop-girls — for, after all, why should shop-girls not 
have their organs ? — or that they are directed by ad- 
vertising managers for the benefit of shop-keepers. 

13 187 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

What is really terrible is that the public is entirely 
indifferent to the fare that is put before it. It is as 
indifferent to the leading articles. 

There is an old skit of Fhackeray's representing the 
astonishment of an Oriental Pasha at the ordered 
routine and the circumstances of an English middle- 
class household. He sees the white breakfast table 
laid, the shining coffee and cream jugs, the eggs and 
bacon bubbling in their silver dishes. The family 
come down and range themselves in their places 
around the table. The Pasha utters the appropriate 
ejaculations and comments at the strangeness of the 
scene. Last of all comes down the master of the 
house. He puts his napkin across his knees, is helped 
to eggs and bacon, and then — comfortably opens his 
newspaper. 

** Bismillah!" the Pasha ejaculates. "Will he read 
through that immense sheet before he applies himself 
to the work of the day.'' By Allah! it is as large as 
the mainsail of his Highness's yacht." 

Mr. Thomlinson, of the sixties and seventies, prob- 
ably did not read through the whole of his paper. 
But he did read the leaders and the foreign corre- 
spondence, and then took himself off to business, his 
wife, with her key-basket, attending him to the hall, 
where she cast a glance at the hatrack to see that her 
husband's hat was well brushed and that his umbrella 
was properly folded. (These last words are not my 
own. They are suggested by the introductory direc- 



POETS AND PRESSES 



tion to a lady of the house in the cookery book written 
by Mrs. Beeton — a work most excellently shadowing 
that almost vanished thing, an English home.) 

Mr. Thomlinson, if he did not ride down to his 
office in the city, drove there in his brougham. The 
remainder of his newspaper he reserved for a com- 
fortable and half-somnolent perusal after dinner 
while Mrs. Thomlinson crocheted and the young 
ladies played "The Battle of Prague" upon the piano 
or looked over the water-color sketches that they 
had made at Ramsgate that summer. Then, with his 
mind comfortably filled with the ideas of his favorite 
leader writers, Mr. Thomlinson would take his flat 
candlestick and go tranquilly to bed. 

When I was a boy it used to be considered a reproach 
with which one could flatten out any bourgeois to say 
that his mind was regulated by the leader in the news- 
paper. And the minds of most of the middle class 
in that day were indeed so regulated. Nowadays it 
would be almost a testimonial to say of a middle-class 
man that he read anything so solid and instructive 
as were the leaders of the seventies and eighties. That 
we do not read the leaders to-day is probably to our 
credit. A little time ago I was in the editorial room 
of one of our great organs. The editor was giving me 
his views upon something or other. A clerk came 
in with a note. The editor interrupted his flow of 
speech to say: 

"Here, you! The German journalists' deputation 

189 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

is coming to London to-morrow. Just write a leader 
about it — I am too busy. Be polite, but not too polite, 
you understand. If you have not time to write it, 
get some one else to do it. Anybody will do. Tell 
them that — not to be too polite. Let them read the 
back-files for what we have said already. I want the 
copy in half an hour." 

You will observe that it would be incorrect to 
say that this leader was going to be written by a 
shop-boy for shop-girls. It was going to be written 
by just any clerk for nobody at all in England. 
Unfortunately, if nobody at all in England to-day 
reads leaders, this is not the case in foreign coun- 
tries. There was once a time when the Standard 
had an immense reputation abroad. Continental 
papers hung upon its lips and attached to its utter- 
ances on foreign politics an enormous and deserved 
importance. And some such importance is still 
attached on the Continent to the utterances of English 
newspapers, though the Standard itself no longer 
monopolizes attention. Thus the utterances of our 
gutter-press, written by any clerk for nobody, and 
carefully observing the editor's direction to be not 
too polite — these utterances find attached to them 
an all too great importance in the newspapers of the 
particular country which, for the time being, the 
proprietor of the newspaper has made up his mind 
to bait. In England they produce no impression at 
all; but abroad, unfortunately, they do a great deal 

190 



POETS AND PRESSES 



of harm, because the foreigner can never really get 
it out of his head that a newspaper represents officially 
the views of the state. This same editor once gave one 
of his departmental sub-editors a fortnight's holiday. 
In this fortnight he was to study the works of Flaubert 
and Maupassant, in order to acquire the quality that 
is called "snap." 

This may appear impossible, yet it is perfectly true. 
But what would have happened in the days of Delane } 
One is a little tired of hearing of Delane, yet there 
is no doubt that Delane was one of the greatest editors 
of papers and one of the great forces of the day. He, 
indeed, earned for the Times the name of "The Thun- 
derer.*' And this he did by means of enormous 
industry and enormous rectitude. He paid unsleeping 
attention to the quality of the paper in all its depart- 
ments. If the musical editor wrote too often or with 
too much enthusiasm of any given prima donna^ or 
if he suspected that it was being done, he would him- 
self take the opportunity of visiting the opera and 
forming an estimate. Or, if he suspected the art 
editor of too much partiality for a living painter, 
Delane would take a great deal of trouble to discover 
what was the general consensus of opinion of the art 
world concerning the claims of that painter. This, 
of course, was not an ideal method of directing crit- 
icism of art. Delane himself was not an authority 
on music, and the general consensus of opinion on 
any given painter will tell, as a rule, very hardly 

191 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

against originality or new genius. Nevertheless, it 
was a conscientious thing to do, and quite the most 
practical in a world where log-rolling is a dangerous 
factor. 

And if there was only one Delane, there were in 
London of that day at least twenty editors of daily 
and weekly papers to whom Delane's ideals were 
ideals too. An editor of that day regarded himself 
as discharging a very responsible and almost sacred 
duty. He discharged it autocratically, and his posi- 
tion was of the utmost security and tenure. He would 
have about him, too, a force of august anonymity, 
and to be in the same room with Delane was to feel 
one's self hushed, as if royalty had been about. Indeed, 
merely to take "copy" to the Times office was to feel 
one's self infinitely humble as regarded that newspaper, 
but nevertheless a functionary of importance in the 
rest of the world. 

And, as with the editors, so with the leader writers. 
These also were august and serious gentlemen. They 
appeared to be of the rank of editors of the great 
quarterlies; or at least they were contributors to these 
revered organs. They would debate the topics of 
the day with the editor-in-chief, and they would 
demand two days to reflect about and to write their 
article if it was one of any importance. In those days, 
in fact, no editor could call to him his clerk and say 
that he wanted a not too polite leader in half an hour. 

I do not mean to say that the actual conditions of 

192 



POETS AND PRESSES 



the English press up to the date of the Boer War 
were altogether ideal. But when a newspaper got its 
hand upon a writer of ability, of genius, or of rectitude, 
it knew what to do with him. It gave him plenty of 
space. It kept occasionally an eye upon him, and it 
left him very much alone. Thus there arose such 
really great journalistic critics as W. E. Henley, the 
late R. A. M. Stevenson, or G. W. Stevens, though 
Stevens lived into and died at the hands of the new 
journaHsm. And these men were really great in their 
own way. I do not mean to say that Henley was a 
great Hterary critic in the sense that Sainte Beuve 
was great, or that fifty Frenchmen are great. But he 
had at least some canons of art, and, right-headed, 
wrong-headed, or altogether beside the mark, he roared 
out gallantly enough the ideas which for the moment 
had possession of him. And I have always considered 
that the final proof that the Tory party is really the 
stupid party — the damning and final proof was that 
it never subsidized Henley and never provided him 
with an organ. Had Henley been a Liberal he would 
have had half a dozen papers at his feet. But the 
Tory party, without a qualm, let die alike the National 
Observer and the New Review, as it would have let 
die fifty periodicals of as fine a genius had Henley 
had the strength or the money to start them. But 
Henley was a very great man, and the circle of writers 
with whom he surrounded himself was very valuable 
and very vital until the death of Henley and the coming 

^93 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

of that never-to-be-sufficiently-accursed war set, as it 
were, an iron door between the past and the present. 

To Henley and his circle I will return; they took, 
as it were, the place of Pre-Raphaelism after Pre- 
Raphaelism had degenerated into a sort of aesthet- 
icism and nestheticism into a sort of mawkish flap- 
doodle. But the point was that the older journalism 
did afford place and space for such vigorous, authen- 
tic, and original writers. Its trouble was that, unless 
an editor was very vigorous, these strong critics, 
getting a too-free hand, would go off into riots of a 
perfectly tremendous log-rolling. 

Thus, for instance, one had the Athenceum under 
the editorship of Mr. Maccoll. Mr. Maccoll was one 
of the most charming and esoterically erudite of men, 
but his mind, I think, was entirely immersed in what 
is called symbolic logic. As to what symbolic logic 
was or may be I have not the faintest idea. One 
evening, when I was walking home with Mr. Maccoll, 
from Doctor Garnett's at the British Museum, Mr. 
Maccoll, with his gentle voice, large person, black 
kid gloves — I never in my life saw him without the 
black kid gloves, either indoors or out — and abstract 
manner, kindly tried to explain to me what this 
science was. But all my mind retained was a vague 
idea that if you called a dog a tree, and a tree R, and 
if you worked it out as an algebraic proposition, you 
would solve the riddle of the universe. At any rate, 
he was a very gentle, kind, and abstracted man, and 

194 



POETS AND PRESSES 



it was a genuine pleasure to see him standing, tall, 
blond, and bald, in the middle of a drawing-room, 
holding in his black kid gloves his cup of tea, and his 
eyes wandering always round and round the frieze 
just below the ceiling. And I have this much to say of 
gratitude to Mr. Maccoll, that, although he enter- 
tained the deepest hostility to my father — a hostility 
which my father vigorously returned — of all the 
friends and enemies that my father and grandfather 
had between them, the editor of the Athencsum^ if I 
except Doctor Garnett and Mr. Watts Dunton, was 
the only one who ever tried to do me a good turn. 

But, under this amiable and scholarly personage, 
the Athenceum was a wildly uncontrolled journal. 
The chief pages, which were supposed to be given up 
to literary criticism, were actually given over to the 
control of one or two antiquarians and archaeologists, 
who used them for the purpose of battle-axing all their 
rival archaeologists and antiquarians. Pure literature 
as such was almost entirely left out in the cold, except 
when Mr. Watts Dunton chose to take a hand. Novels 
were dismissed with a few sniffy words, nearly al- 
ways dictated by the personal feelings of the con- 
tributor. Then there would come endless pages of 
discussions as to the author of Junius — discussions 
that spread out over years and years. Then there 
would be the late Mr. F. G. Stephens battle-axing 
his personal enemies in the columns devoted to art 
criticism, and then would come Mr. Joseph Knight 

195 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

genially and amiably praising his dramatic friends. 
Thus, under the captaincy, but certainly not under 
the control, of Mr. Maccoll, the Athenceum drifted 
magnificently along its way. It would have done 
credit as an archaeological organ to a German uni- 
versity town; its scientific notes were excellent; its 
accuracy in matters of fact was meticulous beyond 
belief; it would condemn as utterly useless a history 
of the world if its author stated that Sir John Glen- 
quorch of Auchtermuchty was the twenty-seventh 
instead of the twenty-sixth baronet. It was, in fact, 
a paradise for bookworms; but, regarded as the 
chief organ of literary, artistic, musical, and dramatic 
criticism of the chief city of the world, it was really 
extraordinary. 



X 



A LITERARY DEITY 

THE log-rolling of the seventies, eighties, and nine- 
ties might be sedate and scientific as in the case 
of the older organs, or it might be uproarious and 
truculent, as it was when Henley and his gang of 
pirates came upon the scene, but at any rate it meant 
that some sort of interest was taken in the liter- 
ary world and that the literary world expected that 
some sort of interest would be taken in it. It certainly 
did. I remember my amazement — ^and, I must add, 
my admiration — when I first read through Rossetti's 
voluminous and innumerable letters to my grandfather 
at about the time when he was publishing his first 
volume of poems. They were really magnificent — 
these letters. I think that no author ever in such a 
splendid way set about securing favorable notices 
from the press. It was not that the author of The 
Blessed Damozel was not ashamed to corrupt the 
press; he simply gloried in it as if it were a game 
or a thrilling adventure. He might have been Napo- 
leon conducting a successful battle; and my grand- 
father might have been his chief of staff. 

197 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

Not a single organ was neglected. It was: Tell 
Watts to get at So-and-So; nobody that I know knows 
Dash, but you might reach him through Blank. 
And so on through many letters and many hurried 
notes as ideas came up in the great man's mind. I 
do not know whether anything of the sort had ever 
been done before, but I am pretty certain it can never 
have been done more thoroughly. It could not have 
been done; there would not have been room. No 
stone was left unturned. And I do not know that I 
see any harm in all this. 

The press responded magnificently, and Rossetti 
is Rossetti! Had he been "Satan" Montgomery the 
press would probably have responded as magnificently, 
and Montgomery would have still been nothing. The 
fact is that the great thing — for literature — is to get 
the public to read books at all. In that case the good 
book will live and the bad book will die after it has 
served its puffed purpose. For that reason I think 
we should never grudge a popular writer his success. 
If a man may make a large fortune out of quack 
medicines, why should another not have his little pros- 
perity from quack books ^ Probably some percentage 
of his readers will go on to read something better; 
the great majority of them would never otherwise 
read anything at all. So that their tastes cannot be 
spoken of as having been debauched. 

The only thing which is fatal is indifference, and of 
that we have to-day a large quantity. We have, 

198 




THOMAS HARDY 



A LITERARY DEITY 



indeed, nothing else, so that a fatal lethargy has 
settled down upon publishers as upon authors, 
upon the press, and, above all, upon the public. 
In the good old days when log-rolling was a frequent 
and profitable adventure, it was entirely different. 
Those were fine days to have lived through. There 
remained the Pre-Raphaelites throning it on their 
altitudes, their spies and vedettes making thunder in 
all the journals when Mr. Rossetti or Mr. Swinburne 
or Mr. Ruskin, or even when any of the lesser lights 
turned over as it were in his Olympian slumbers and 
produced a new volume. There was Mr. Meredith 
beginning to come into his own. The Amazing 
Marriage or Lord Ormont and His Aminta was appear- 
ing as a serial in the Universal Review — that fine 
enterprise for which Mr. Harry Quilter was never 
sufficiently praised or thanked. There, too, Mr. 
Meredith's Jump to Glory Jane was mystifying us 
not a little. Mr. Thomas Hardy also was coming 
into his own. His Pair of Blue Eyes was in all our 
mothers' mouths. The enormous glory of Lorna 
Doone was still illuminating thousands of middle-class 
homes. This book I remember to have read over and 
over again when I was a boy. I fancy I know it 
nearly all by heart, so that now if any one would start 
me with: "If any one would hear a plain tale told 
plainly, I, John Ridd, of the parish of Oare ..." 
or "Now the manner of a winkie is this ..." I 
could go on with the quotation for pages. Yet I 

199 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

cannot have looked at Lorna Doone for twenty years. 
Johtz Inglesmit was also having its reputation made 
by means of Mr. Gladstone's postcards. So with 
many other books. Was there not The Story of an 
African Farm ^ Did not Ships that Pass in the Night 
bring tears into the eyes of innumerable young per- 
sons .f* Mr. Anthony Hope's Dolly Dialogues were 
appearing in the fVestminster Gazette. The West- 
minster Gazette itself startled the enthusiastic world 
by appearing on green paper. It told us all that 
this green paper would be the salvation of all our 
eyes. I know I ruined mine by reading of Ladv 
Mickleham night after night in the dimly lit carriages 
of the glamorous Underground. For in those days 
there was a glamorous Underground. It smelled of 
sulphur as hell is supposed to smell; its passages 
were as gloomy as Tartarus' was supposed to be, 
and smokes and fumes poured from all its tunnels, 
while its carriages were lit by oil lamps, so that little 
pools of oil swayed and trembled in the bottoms of 
the globe-like lamp-glasses. And, standing up, 
holding my green paper up against the lamp, I used 
to read those wonderful dialogues while the train 
jolted me along through the Cimmerian gloom. Why, 
I remember going up to Manchester with my grand- 
father, and in the train sat a publisher whom my 
grandfather spoke of as young Heinemann. He was 
relating with the utmost enthusiasm that he had had 
a manuscript sent him called, I think, The Scape Goat. 

200 



A LITERARY DEITY 



This, young Heinemann said, was the finest novel 
that had ever been written. It was not for some time 
afterward that my grandfather realized that the 
author of this work was who he was, and that he him- 
self had given this author, as it were, his literary 
baptism and an introduction to Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti. 

My grandfather, I remember, regarded The Scape 
Goat as a work of "genius." His literary tastes were 
peculiar. Thus, during the last nights of his life, 
when I used to go into his bedroom to see if he were 
sleeping in safety, I should perceive, resting in the flat 
candlestick beside his bed, not only his watch and his 
spectacles, but a copy of Eugene Sue's Mysteres de 
Paris. This book he was rereading at the suggestion 
of Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and he considered it also to 
be a work of "genius." He did not live to finish it, 
but died in the night shortly after he had laid it down. 
Rossetti, too, I think, regarded Sue's work as of 
"genius." And then the two painters would never 
be tired of reading Meinhold's Amber Witch and 
Sidonia the Sorceress. But then Rossetti regarded 
Flaubert as morbid and too cynically immoral to be 
read by any respectable painter-poet — such a queer 
thing is literary taste! 

And such a queer thing, too, is the ascription of 
morbidity. Thus, Doctor Garnett, a high functionary 
of the British Museum, a very learned man and the 
writer of the only volume of really scholarly and 

201 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

ironic tales that exists in the EngHsh language, found 
that Christina Rossetti, who had the mind of a me- 
diaeval ascetic, was "morbid." Yet, upon the whole, 
the lesson of Christina Rossetti was that, although 
life is a sad thing, we must put up with it and regard 
the trials it brings us as being a certain preparation 
for a serene and blessed immortality. Whereas, upon 
the whole. Doctor Garnett's message to the world 
was one of a scholarly negation of pretentious virtues 
— a sort of mellow cynicism. Or, again, we find 
Rossetti a man of as many irregularities as one man 
could reasonably desire in one earthly existence, a 
man whose poetry, if it has any lesson at all, teaches 
no lesson of asceticism — we find Rossetti, in 1870, 
saying that it was no wonder that France danced and 
stumbled into disaster when it could produce a work 
so morbid as Madame Bovary. 

Yet Flaubert was a man of the utmost personal 
chastity, of the most bourgeois honesty, and of the 
most idealistic patriotism when his sympathies were 
aroused by the tragic downfall of his country. And 
Madame Bovary is a w^ork which surely more than any 
other points out how disastrous from a material point 
of view is marital infidelity. Yet it shocked Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti. 

Flaubert, on the other hand, considered that if France 
had read U Education Sentimentale France would have 
been spared the horrors of the debacle. Maxime du 
Camp grins and giggles over this idea of Flaubert's, 

202 



A LITERARY DEITY 



But, reading and rereading, as I do, this, the greatest 
of all modern romances, I can understand very well 
what this blond and gigantic writer, with his torrents 
of Berserker rage over the imbecilities of the common 
mind — I can understand very well what he meant. 
For L'Educatton Sentiment ah is romantic in that it 
depicts life as being the inverse of the facile romance 
of the cloak and sword and catch-word — the romance 
of easy victory and little effort. And France, from 
the downfall of Napoleon I. to the downfall of Napo- 
leon III., was, above all other lands, that of the catch- 
word and the easy victory. Governments fell at the 
mere shaking of the head of a purely selfish bour- 
geoisie. Charles X. fled, Louis Philippe fled, the 
Second Republic fell before risings that were mere 
flocking together of idle spouters of catch-words. 
Victories over trifling foes, victories in Algiers, in the 
Crimea, over the Austrians, over the Mexicans, vic- 
tories of the most easy, were supposed to add laurels 
to the eagles of Jena and Austerlitz. And all the 
while in these easy revolutions the character of the 
French people grew softer and more verbose, and 
under the smoke of these easy victories the character 
of the French army became softer and more a matter 
of huge gestures. It was these facts that Flaubert 
painted in L'Education Sentimentale. It was these 
morals that his facts would have pointed out to the 
French people if they had read his book. But, indeed, 
L'Education Sentimentale is too inspired by contempt 
14 203 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

for inanity and fine phrases, it so points the finger 
toward the road of sanity and fine effort, that any 
nation that really read and marked it might well find 
itself mistress of the world. I am, however, as yet 
unaware that any nation has betaken itself to the 
study of the aflFairs of Frederic Moreau and of Mme. 
Arnoux. So we shall have to go on building Dread- 
noughts until the arrival of a blessed time of which no 
omens are very visible in our skies. 

It is, indeed, a curious thing, the criticism that one 
great artist will bestow upon another. Thus Tur- 
geniev acknowledges the receipt of L'Education Sen- 
timentale. He writes to Flaubert: "This is, indeed, 
a work of genius" in the proper and conventional 
manner. And then, growing really pleased, he pro- 
ceeds to tear to pieces the beautiful little pas- 
sage in which Flaubert describes Mme. Arnoux 
singing: 

"Elle se tenait debout, pres du clavier, les bras 
tombants, le regard perdu. Quelquefois pour lire la 
musique elle clignait ses paupieres, en avancant le 
front un instant. Sa voix de contralto prenait dans les 
cordes basses une intonation lugubre qui glacait, et 
alors sa belle tete aux grands sourcils s'inclinait sur 
son epaule. Sa poitrine se gonflait, ses bras s'ecar- 
taient, son cou d'ou s'echappaient des roulades se 
renversait mollement comme sous des baisers . . . elle 
lanca trois notes aigues, redescendit, en jeta une plus 
haute encore, et, apres un silence, termina par un 
point d'orgue." 

204 




GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 



A LITERARY DEITY 



This struck Turgeniev as being supremely ridic- 
ulous, and it was the main thing which did strike him 
in this enormous and overpowering work. It was 
like the Athenceum, which condemned a history of the 
world because Sir John Glenquoich of Auchtermuchty 
was described as the twenty-sixth instead of the twenty- 
seventh baronet. I suppose this was because the 
Athenceum critic had got hold of a guide to Auchter- 
muchty. Similarly, Turgeniev, living in the constant 
society of the Viardots, and more particularly in that 
of that great singer, Pauline Lucca — Turgeniev had 
at the moment in his mind a meticulous admiration 
for musical exclusiveness. Pauline Lucca would have 
ended her songs with a dazzling cadenza — a shower 
of small notes. 

Yes, it is impossible to say whether Turgeniev or 
Flaubert were the greatest of all novelists. They lived 
and unfolded their unprecedented talents in the same 
years, in the same city, in the same circle, filled with 
the same high ideals and high enthusiasms. And this 
is a very striking proof of how high effort in the arts 
flourishes by the m.ere contagion of contact. It is 
the custom of grudging Russophiles to declare that 
Turgeniev gained nothing by living in France. Or, 
even, it is their custom to declare that he lost a great 
deal. Nothing will be truer than to say that Tur- 
geniev was born with a natural gift and a natural 
technique that made him at once the most gifted 
and the most technically perfect of all writers. His 

205^ 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

first story, which was written before he was twenty- 
one, and before he had ever been to France, is as 
perfect as is Fathers and Children or Tlie House 
of the Gentlefolk. And it would be as absurd to 
say that Flaubert or Gautier influenced the character 
of Turgeniev's works as it would be to say that 
Turgeniev was an influence to Zola, Maupassant, 
or the Goncourts. Great writers, or strong person- 
alities, when they have passed their impressionable 
years, are no longer subject to influences. They 
develop along lines of their own geniuses. But they 
are susceptible to sympathy, to encouragement, to 
ideas of rivalry, to contagious ambitions. And only 
too frequently they have a necessity for a tranquil 
and sympathetic home-life. The one set of incentives 
Turgeniev found among the French masters. The 
other was given him in the home of the Viardots. 
Such an existence he could have found nowhere else 
in the civilized world of that day. 

I remember Turgeniev personally only as a smile. 
He had been taken by poor Ralston, the first of his 
translators into E^nglish, to call upon Rossetti. Tur- 
geniev was in England for grouse-shooting, to which 
he was passionately attached. And, not finding 
Rossetti at home, Ralston had brought the Russian 
master to call upon my grandfather. Both Turgeniev 
and Ralston were men of gigantic stature— each of 
them six foot six in height, or something like it, and 
I cannot have been more than two foot two at the 

206 



A LITERARY DEITY 



most — a small child in a blue pinafore. I must have 
been alone in the immense studio that had once been 
the drawing-room of Colonel Newcome. At any rate, 
it is recorded as the earliest incident of my checkered 
and adventurous career, and, moreover, as evidencing 
the exquisite politeness that at that time had been 
taught me — I hope I may not since have lost it — that 
my grandfather, coming into the studio, found me 
approaching the two giants and exclaiming in a high 
treble: "Won't you take a chair ?" I must have been 
one, two, or three years of age at the time. 

I do not know that the anecdote is of any interest 
to anybody, but it pleases me to think that thus in the 
person of Turgeniev these two circles touched for a 
moment. For that other circle of Flaubert and his 
friends had aims very similar — had the same high 
views of the priestcraft of the arts. Each in its 
different way influenced very enormously the life and 
the thoughts of their respective countries. The in- 
fluence of the Pre-Raphaelites was certainly less 
extended than that of the great French realists; never- 
theless after the passage of half a generation or so in 
the form of aestheticism this influence also crossed the 
Channel, so that, in France, in Belgium, in Russia, 
and perhaps still more in Germany, you will find many 
houses that might have been furnished by Morris 
& Company — houses where the cult of Burne -Jones 
and Rossetti, and perhaps still more that of Oscar 
Wilde, is carried on. These seeds have, indeed, been 

207 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

blown to the ends of the earth, so that, taking my walk 
the other morning through the streets of an obscure and 
sufficiently remote German town, the first thing that 
struck my eyes in a bookseller's window were two 
large and not very good reproductions of die Saluta- 
tion of Beatrice 2ind of Beata Beatrix. 

In somewhat the same slow manner the influence 
of Flaubert, Turgeniev, and their followers has crossed 
the Channel. And now, half a generation or so after 
their death, you will find a few English writers who 
have read a book or so of Flaubert, and perhaps a 
thousand or tvvo of English men and women who 
have read something of Turgeniev. For this last we 
have to thank, in the first place, Mrs. Constance 
Garnett, whose translation of Turgeniev's works has 
given me, I think, more pleasure than anything else 
in this world except, perhaps, the writings of Mr. W. 
Hudson. Whenever I am low, whenever I am feeble 
or very tired or pursued by regrets, I have only to 
take up one or the other of these writers. It does not 
much matter which. For immediately I am brought 
into contact with a wise, a fine, an infinitely soothing 
personality. I assimilate pleasure with no effort at 
all, and so weariness leaves me, regrets go away to a 
distance, and I am no more conscious of a very dull 
self. Mr. Hudson is, of course, the finest, the most 
delicate, and the most natural of stylists that we have 
or that we have ever had. Perhaps I should except 
Mrs. Garnett, who has contrived to translate Tur- 

208 



A LITERARY DEITY 



geniev, with all his difficulties, into a language so simple 
and so colloquial. Each of these writers writes with 
language as little complicated as that of a child. 
Word after word sinks into the mind, pervading it as 
water slowly soaks into sands. You are, in fact, un- 
conscious that you are reading. You are just con- 
scious of pleasure as you might be in the sunshine. 
And this, for me, is the highest praise, or, let me 
say, the deepest gratitude, that I have to bestow. If 
I could express it better I would, but I find no 
other words. 

Turgeniev, as I have said, is little read in England. 
I think I remember to have heard the publisher of the 
English translation say that he had sold on an average 
fourteen hundred sets of his edition. Supposing, 
therefore, that each set has been read by five persons, 
we find that perhaps seven thousand of the inhabitants 
of the British Isles have an acquaintance with this 
writer. And, since Turgeniev may be regarded as 
one of the greatest writers of the world — the writer 
who has done for the novel what Shakespeare did for 
the drama. Homer for the epic, or Heine for lyric 
verse — and since the population of the British Isles 
is some forty-eight millions, these figures may be said 
to be fairly creditable. 

This is creditable, for it means that, if you took a 
walk through London with a placard on your back 
bearing the words, " Have you read Turgeniev .?" you 
might, during an afternoon's walk in South Kensing- 

209 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

ton, receive affirmative answer from possibly two 
people. In Hampstead the adventure would be m.ore 
profitable. You would probably find at least ten who 
responded. That, I think, is about the proportion, 
for it must be remembered that South Kensington is 
the home of pure culture in our islands, whereas 
Hampstead is the home of culture plus progress, 
rational dress, and vegetarianism. This, of course, is 
why Turgeniev is read at all in England. 

Being a Russian, he is supposed in some way to 
help you toward being a better socialist — for, in 
England, we do not read for pleasure, but when we 
read at all we read in order to be made a better some- 
thing or other. That is why you will find ten persons 
who have read Turgeniev for one who has read Flau- 
bert. In fact, having met, God knows, hundreds and 
hundreds of English literary people, I have met only 
one who has read the whole of Flaubert's works or 
began to understand what was meant by the art of 
this great writer. And even he found U Education 
Sentimentale a tough proposition. But then it is im- 
possible to be made a better socialist by reading 
Flaubert, and there is a general impression among 
English writers that, to read him, to be influenced by 
him, would be to diminish your "price per thou." 
Indeed, I was once begged by the tearful but charming 
wife of a distinguished Englishman of letters to desist 
from advising her husband to learn what lessons he 
could from the French master. She said: 

210 



A LITERARY DEITY 



"Billy has such a struggle as it is. His work isn't 
at all popular. We do want to have a motor-car. And 
then there are the poor children." And the poor lady, 
with her tear-swimming eyes, looked agonizedly at me 
as if I were a monster threatening the domesticity of 
her home. For the sake of the poor children I am glad 
to say that Billy did not take my advice. He never 
went to Mudie's for a second-hand copy of Un Cceur 
Simple; his short stories are becoming increasingly 
popular in the sixpenny magazines. I believe he has 
his motor-car, but I do not know, for his wife made 
him take the opportunity to quarrel with me shortly 
afterward. She would, I think, have encouraged him 
to lend me money in large sums; she would have 
trusted me to take her children out for walks. But I 
had threatened the most sacred thing of the literary 
domestic hearth; I had given her husband wicked 
counsel. Almost I had endangered his price per 
thousand words. I must go. 

This story, which is perfectly true, has a moral of 
the deepest. For the gradual elevation of "price per 
thou" to the estate of the sole literary God in England 
has come about in many and devious manners. In 
the old days there was a thing that was called a pot- 
boiler. This was an occasional piece of inferior work 
which you produced in order to keep yourself from 
starvation while you meditated higher and quite 
unprofitable flights. Your mind was set upon immor- 
tality, and from posterity you hoped to receive the 

211 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

ultimate crown. A quarter of a century ago this 
feeling was absolutely dominant. It was so strong, it 
was so dinned into me, that still, when I really an- 
alyze my thoughts, I find I am writing all the while 
with an eye to posterity. I am ashamed of myself. 
Anxious to be a modern of the moderns, anxious 
to be as good a man of business as the latest literary 
knight, or the first member of the British Academy 
of Letters, whoever they may be, I find myself 
still thinking that I am writing for an entirely un- 
profitable immortality. I desire fervently to possess 
a motor-car, a country seat, a seat in the House of 
Commons, the ear of the Home Secretary, or a bath 
of cut crystal with silver taps that flow champagne 
or eau de cologne. I desire immensely to be influen- 
tial, expensive, and all the rest of it. But still I go on 
writing for posterity. 

It is, I presume, in the blood, in the training. My 
great-great-grandfather Brown was the first anti-lancet 
surgeon. He was a person of expensive and jovial 
tastes. He loved port wine and he died insolvent in 
the King's Bench Prison. Frederick the Great invited 
him to be his body surgeon. Napoleon the Great 
always released any English surgeon he might take 
prisoner if he could prove that he was a pupil of Dr. 
John Brown. Napoleon considered that the pupils 
of Brown were benefactors to humanity. But Dr. 
John Brown died in a debtor's prison because he 
invented and stuck to the surgery of posterity. Ford 

212 



A LITERARY DEITY 



Brown, his son, an ardent politician of a Whig com- 
plexion, quarrelled violently with his relative and patron, 
Commodore Sir Isaac Coffin, who was a Tory, and lost 
alike all chance of promotion in the Service and all chance 
of patronage for his son Ford, who had been inscribed 
as a midshipman on the books of the Arethusa frigate. 
Ford Brown, therefore, died in reduced circumstances, 
an embittered man because of his devotion to the polit- 
ical principles of posterity. And Ford Madox Brown, 
his son, died in reduced circumstances, still painting 
away at pictures the merit of which he hoped that 
posterity would see. 

But I do not mean to say that he was above painting 
the humble pot-boiler. On the contrary, his efforts 
to do so were frequent and pathetic. Thus, for quite 
a long time for a guinea a day he worked at enlarging 
daguerreotypes and painting posthumous portraits in 
the portrait factory of Messrs. Dickinson. At the 
same time he was giving twelve years of toil to his one 
large picture called '*Work." During the Crimean 
War he tried desperately to get commissions for a 
series of twelve popular designs with titles like "The 
Bugle Calls," "The Troopship Sails," " In the Trenches 
Before Sebastopol," "Wounded," and "The Return 
Home," which represented a gentleman with only 
one arm and one leg coming back to the embraces 
of a buxom English matron and five children of vary- 
ing sizes. But he never got any commission for any 
such work. Mr. Gambart and the print-sellers were 

213 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

much too wise. Later, he attempted to paint pictures 
of the dog and child order, made famous by the late 
Mr. Burton Barber. In this attempt he was eminently 
unsuccessful. 

Rossetti, on the other hand, was as successful with 
pot-boilers as Madox Brown was the reverse. He 
drew in pastel or charcoal innumerable large heads of 
women with plentiful hair and bare necks and shoul- 
ders. These he sold for huge sums, giving them 
Latin or Italian titles. Sometimes the occupation 
palled upon him. Then he wrote: 'T can't be both- 
ered to give the thing a name. A head is a head, and 
that is an end of it." But generally he found names 
like "Aurea Catena." Millais, of course, occupied 
the latter years of his life with practically nothing but 
pot-boilers, except that toward his very end he re- 
pented bitterly and tried once more to paint as he 
had done when he was still a Pre-Raphaelite brother. 
Holman Hunt was as unsuccessful as Madox Brown 
in turning out real pot-boilers; though "The Light of 
the World" had as much success as if it had been 
painted in that spirit. 

The point is that none of these painters and none 
of the writers who surrounded them had any contempt 
for money as such. They wanted it, but it was not 
the end and aim of their existence. And "price per 
thou" not having been invented in those days, they 
did not become agonized, thrilled, or driven mad at 
the thought of this deity. 

214 



A LITERARY DEITY 



Nor, indeed, did this goddess so much perturb the 
writers for whom Mr. Henley was the centre. His 
disciples desired money perhaps a little more than the 
Pre-Raphaelites, and revered their work perhaps a 
little less. On the other hand, perhaps again they 
really tried more to make a good job of their work. 
There was less of panoply, mysticism, and aloof- 
ness; they expected less of the trimming of their 
work and put more power into their elbows. They 
had, too, none of the feeling of standing apart from 
the common herd of life. They wanted as much 
as anything to be men — upon the whole, quite com- 
monplace men, indulging in orgies of tobacco, whiskey, 
and the other joys of the commercial traveller. About 
love as they handled it there was nothing mystic; 
passion justified nothing. It was kiss and pay and go, 
and when you married you settled down. Dante in 
his relations with Beatrice they voted a bore, but, on 
the other hand, they admired the tortures that he 
invented for his adversaries in hell. 

It was an entirely different atmosphere. There was 
about it nothing Italianate. Most of Henley's gang 
saw no shame in indulging in occasional bouts of 
journalism. Many of them were content to be called 
journalists, and did not mind a damn as long as they 
turned out jolly good stuff. 

I confess that had I known of their attitude of mind 
in those days it would have shocked and pained me. 
Nowadays I think they were rather fine fellows, and 

215 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

that it does not matter much what they did. In 
those days they seemed to me to be strange and 
rough. I came out of the hothouse atmosphere of 
Pre-RaphaeHsm where I was being trained for a genius. 
I regarded that training with a rather cold distaste. 
On the other hand, Henley and his friends seemed to 
me to be unreasonably boisterous and too loudly cock- 
sure. Henley, who presented the appearance of a huge, 
mountainous, scaly, rough-clothed individual, with his 
pipe always in his hand and his drink always at his 
elbow, once damned my eyes up hill and down dale 
for half an hour because I sustained the argument 
that // Principe was written, not by Aretino, but by 
Machiavelli. Henley had suffered from some slip of 
the tongue and, although he must have been perfectly 
aware of it in the next second, he chose to stand to 
his guns, and, as I have said, swore at me for quite a 
long time. At last this seemed to grow monotonous, 
and I said: "God damn jyow, Mr. Henley. If Machia- 
velli did not write // Principe I will give a pound to 
the first beggar I meet in the street." 

I expected to die, but Henley suddenly grinned, 
passed his tobacco jar over to me, and said, "Of 
course he did," and began again to talk of Stevenson. 
He talked of Stevenson with an extraordinary mixture 
of the deepest affection and of the utterance of innu- 
merable grudges. It was about the time — or just after 
it — that his article on Robert Louis Stevenson ap- 
peared in small type at the end of the Pall Mall 

216 



A LITERARY DEITY 



Magazine, and that article was setting the whole 
town agog. I do not know that the conversation with 
Henley added anything to my comprehension of the 
matter. But the repetition of Henley's grudges was 
a much pleasanter thing in words than in small type. 
You had the man before you; you were much better 
able to appreciate from his tone of voice where he 
exaggerated and where he meant you to know that he 
exaggerated. 



1 



XI 

DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

LITERARY quarrels such as separated Henley 
■' and Robert Louis Stevenson are always rather 
tragic, are always rather comic. They have about 
them a flavor of regret such as distinguishes the older 
French music. That they are usually bitter in the 
extreme is due to the fact that the writer possesses a 
pen and the power to express himself. He possesses 
also an imagination. So that, not only does his mind 
make mole-hills of grievance assume the aspect of 
mountains of villainy, but, with his pen going forty 
to the dozen, he sets down in wounding words the tale 
of his griefs. His griefs may be nothing at all — 
generally they are so. Sometimes they may amount to 
real treachery, for the artist with his stretched nerves 
easily loses any sense of right or wrong where his 
personal affairs are concerned. Not infrequently new 
wives will break up old friendships, the wines being 
too strong for the otherwise well-tried bottle. Now- 
adays money sometimes comes in; in the olden times 
it did, too, but much less often. I remember my 
grandfather laying down a rule of life for me. He said : 

218 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

"Fordy, never refuse to help a lame dog over a 
stile. Never lend money; always give it. When you 
give money to a man that is down, tell him that it is 
to help him to get up, tell him that when he is up 
he should pass on the money you have given him to 
any other poor devil that is down. Beggar yourself 
rather than refuse assistance to any one whose genius 
you think shows promise of being greater than your 
own." 

This is a good rule of life. I wish I could have 
lived up to it. The Pre - Raphaelites, as I have 
tried to make plain, quarrelled outrageously, as you 
might put it, about their boots or their washing. 
But these quarrels as a rule were easily made up; 
they hardly ever quarrelled about money, and they 
never, at their blackest moments, blackened the fame 
of each other as artists. One considerable convulsion 
did threaten to break up Pre-Raphaelite society. This 
was caused by the dissolution of the firm of Morris, 
Marshall, Faulkner & Company. Originally in this 
firm there were seven members, all either practising 
or aspiring artists. The best known were William 
Morris, Rossetti, Burne - Jones, and Madox Brown. 
The "Firm" was founded originally by these men as 
a sort of co-operative venture. Each of the artists 
supplied designs, which originally were paid for in 
furniture, glass, or fabrics. Each of the seven part- 
ners found a certain proportion of the capital — about 
;^ioo apiece, I think. As time went on they added 
15 219 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

more capital in varying proportions, Morris supplying 
by far the greater part. Gradually the " Firm " became 
an important undertaking. It supplied much furni- 
ture to the general public; it supplied a great number 
of stained-glass windows to innumerable churches and 
cathedrals. It may be said to have revolutionized at 
once the aspect of our homes and the appearance 
of most of cur places of worship. But, while the 
original partnership existed, the finances of the "Firm" 
were always in a shaky condition. It paid its artists 
very little, or next to nothing. I happen to possess 
my grandfather's book of accounts with the "Firm." 
It shows that he supplied them with something 
more than three hundred designs, of which perhaps a 
hundred and fifty were cartoons for stained glass and 
the others for tables, chairs, sofas, water-bottles, 
wine-glasses, bell-pulls, and who knows what. For 
these he was credited with sums that at first were 
quite insignificant — ^i ioj-. for a stained-glass cartoon, 
ten shillings for a table, half a crown for a drinking- 
glass. And these sums were paid in kind. Later 
the sums paid became somewhat larger, but were still 
quite inadequate, if they were to be considered as 
ordinary transactions of the open market. I think 
that the largest sum that Madox Brown received for 
any cartoon was £^. The other artists received 
exactly similar prices, whether they were Rossetti, 
Mr. Philip Webb, or Mr. Peter Paul Marshall. 
As the years went by the "Firm," though it extended 

220 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

its operations enormously, showed no signs of becoming 
financially prosperous. William Morris supplied more 
and more capital until, although for those days and 
for that set he was a very wealthy man, his financial 
position was rapidly becoming precarious. The posi- 
tion was thus extremely complicated. Morris had 
supplied a great quantity of money; the other artists, 
and more particularly Madox Brown and Rossetti, 
had supplied a really immense amount of work, partly 
for the love of the thing and partly because they 
thought that they would ultimately receive adequate 
payment. A certain amount of irritation was caused 
by the fact that Morris, as the head of the " Firm," 
ordered gradually more and more work from Burne- 
Jones and his particular friends, and less and less 
from Madox Brown and Rossetti. This was perfectly 
reasonable, for Burne- Jones was a popular artist for 
whose designs there was much demand, while Madox 
Brown and Rossetti, in the nature of things, were 
comparatively little in request. It was natural and 
legitimate, but it could not fail to be wounding to the 
neglected artists. 

The day came when Morris perceived that the only 
way to save himself from ruin was to get rid of the 
other partners of the " Firm," to take possession of it 
altogether, and to put it in a sound and normal finan- 
cial position. There was here the makings of a very 
pretty financial row. I have only stated this case — 
which has already been stated several times — in order 

221 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

to make it clear how nicely balanced the position was. 
There was no doubt that the "Firm" could be made 
a great financial success. Indeed, it afterward became 
so, and so I believe it remains. Madox Brown, and to 
a less degree Rossetti, considered that they had devoted 
the labors of many years to contributing to this suc- 
cess. They knew that the reconstituted and successful 
"Firm" would commission no work of theirs, and all 
their labors had been very inadequately paid for. 
Morris, on the other hand, had to consider that he 
had supplied by far the greater amount of the capital 
which for so many years had kept the "Firm" going, 
and, if at that date it was at the point of success, this 
was due to the popular quality of the designs which 
he and Burne-Jones supplied. The legal agreements 
which constituted the "Firm" were of the haziest 
kind. Nowadays I take it there would be the makings 
of a splendid and instructive lawsuit. But Morris 
& Company passed into the hands of William Morris; 
Rossetti, Madox Brown, and the rest were displaced, 
and there was practically no outcry at all. This was 
very largely due to the self-sacrificing labors of Mr. 
Watts Dunton — surely the best of friends recorded in 
histories or memoirs. How he did it I cannot begin 
to imagine; but he must have spent many sleepless 
nights and have passed many long days in talking to 
these formidable and hot-blooded partners. Of 
course he had to aid him the fact that each of these 
artists cared more for their work than for money, 

222 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

and more for the decencies of life and good-fellowship 
than for the state of their pass-books. 

A certain amount of coldness subsisted for some 
time between all the parties, and indeed I have no 
doubt that they all said the most outrageous things 
against each other. Some of them, indeed, I have 
heard, but in the end that gracious and charming 
person, Lady Burne-Jones, succeeded in bringing 
all the parties together again. William Morris sent 
Madox Brown copies of all the books he had written 
during the estrangement, Madox Brown sent William 
Morris a tortoiseshell box containing a dozen very 
brilliant bandana pocket-handkerchiefs, and joined 
the Kelmscott House Socialist League. Indeed, one 
of the prettiest things I can remember was having 
seen Madox Brown sitting in the central aisle of the 
little shed attached to Morris's house at Hammer- 
smith. Both of them were white-headed then; my 
grandfather's hair was parted in the middle and fell, 
long and extremely thick, over each of his ears. It 
may interest those whose hair concerns them to know 
that every morning of his life he washed his head in 
cold water and with common yellow soap, coming 
down to breakfast with his head still dripping. I 
don't know if that were the reason; but at any rate 
he had a most magnificent crop of hair. So these 
two picturesque persons recemented their ancient 
friendship under the shadow of a social revolution 
that I am sure my grandfather did not in the least 

223 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

understand, and that William Morris probably under- 
stood still less. I suppose that Madox Brown really 
expected the social revolution to make an end of all 
"damned Academicians." Morris, on the other hand, 
probably expected that the whole world would go 
dressed in curtain serge, supplied in sage-green and 
neutral tints by a "Firm" of Morris & Company that 
should constitute the whole state. Afterward we all 
went in to tea in Kelmscott House itself — Morris, 
my grandfather, and several disciples. The room was 
large and, as I rem.ember it, white. A huge carpet 
ran up one of its walls so as to form a sort of dais; 
beneath this sat Mrs. Morris, the most beautiful 
woman of her day. At the head of the table sat 
Morris, at his right hand my grandfather, who resem- 
bled an animated king of hearts. The rest of the 
long table was crowded in a mediaeval sort of way 
by young disciples with low collars and red ties, or 
by maidens in the inevitable curtain serge, and mostly 
with a necklace of bright amber. The amount of 
chattering that went on was considerable. Morris, I 
suppose, was tired with his lecturing and answering 
of questions, for at a given period he drew from his 
pocket an enormous bandana handkerchief in scarlet 
and green. This he proceeded to spread over his face, 
and leaning back in his chair he seemed to compose 
himself to sleep after the manner of elderly gentlemen 
taking their naps. One of the young maidens began 
asking my grandfather some rather inane questions — 

224 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

what did Mr. Brown think of the weather, or what 
was Mr. Brown's favorite picture at the Academy ? 
For all the disciples of Mr. Morris were not equally 
advanced in thought. 

Suddenly Morris tore the handkerchief from before 
his face and roared out: 

"Don't be such an intolerable fool, Polly!" No- 
body seemed to mind this very much — nor, indeed, 
was the reproved disciple seriously abashed, for almost 
immediately afterward she asked: 

"Mr. Brown, do you think that Sir Frederick 
Leighton is a greater painter than Mr. Frank Dick- 
see : 

Morris, however, had retired once more behind his 
handkerchief, and I presume he had given up in 
despair the attempt to hint to his disciple that Mr. 
Brown did not like Royal Academicians. I do not 
remember how my grandfather got out of this invid- 
ious comparison, but I do remember that when, 
shortly afterward, the young lady said to him: 

"You paint a little too, don't you, Mr. Brown?*' 

He answered: 

"Only with my left hand.'* 

This somewhat mystified the young lady, but it 
was perfectly true, for shortly before then Madox 
Brown had had a stroke of paralysis which rendered 
his right hand almost entirely useless. He was then 
engaged in painting with his left the enormous pict- 
ure of "Wycliffe on His Trial," which was to have 

225 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

been presented by subscribing admirers to the National 
Gallery. 

This was the last time that Madox Brown and 
Morris met. And they certainly parted with every 
cordiality. Madox Brown had indeed quite enjoyed 
himself. I had been rather afraid that he would 
have been offended by Morris's retirement behind 
the pocket-handkerchief. But when we were on the 
road home Madox Brown said : 

"Well, that was just like old Topsy. In the Red 
Lion Square days he was always taking naps while 
we jawed. That was how Arthur Hughes was able 
to tie Topsy's hair into knots. And the way he 
talked to that gal — why, my dear chap — it was just 
the way he called the Bishop of Lincoln a bloody 
bishop! No, Morris isn't changed much." It was 
a few days after this, in the evening, that Madox 
Brown, painting at his huge picture, pointed to the 
top of the frame that already surrounded the canvas. 
Upon the top was inscribed **Ford Madox Brown," 
and on the bottom, **Wycliffe on His Trial Before John 
of Gaunt. Presented to the National Gallery by a 
Committee of Admirers of the Artist." In this way the 
"X" of Madox Brown came exactly over the centre 
of the picture. It was Madox Brown's practice to 
begin a painting by putting in the eyes of the central 
figure. This, he considered, gave him the requisite 
strength of tone that would be applied to the whole 
canvas. And indeed I believe that, once he had 

226 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

painted in those eyes, he never in any picture altered 
them, however much he might alter the picture 
itself. He used them as it were to work up to. Having 
painted in these eyes, he would begin at the top left- 
hand corner of the canvas, and would go on painting 
downward in a nearly straight line until the picture 
was finished. He would, of course, have made a 
great number of studies before commencing the pict- 
ure itself. Usually there was an exceedingly minute 
and conscientious pencil-drawing, then a large char- 
coal cartoon, and after that, for the sake of the color 
scheme, a version in water-color, in pastels, and 
generally one in oil. In the case of the Manchester 
frescoes, almost every one was preceded by a small 
version painted in oils upon a panel, and this was 
the case with the large Wycliffe. 

On this, the last evening of his life, Madox Brown 
pointed with his brush to the "X" of his name. 
Below it, on the left-hand side, the picture was com- 
pletely filled in; on the right it was completely blank 
— a waste of slightly yellow canvas that gleamed in 
the dusky studio. He said: 

"You see I have got to that *X.' I am glad of it, 
for half the picture is done and it feels as if I were 
going home." 

Those, I think, were his last words. He laid his 
brushes upon his painting cabinet, scraped his palette 
of all mixed paints, laid his palette upon his brushes 
and his spectacles upon his palette. He took off 

227 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

the biretta that he always wore when he was painting 
— he must have worn such a biretta for upward of 
half a century — ever since he had been a French 
student. And so, having arrived at his end-of-the- 
day routine, which he had followed for innumerable 
years, he went upstairs to bed. He probably read a 
little of the Mystercs de Pans, and died in his sleep, 
the picture with its inscriptions remaining down- 
stairs, a little ironic, a little pathetic, and unfinished. 

I haven't the least idea of where Madox Brown's 
fame as an artist to-day may stand. It is impossible 
to form an estimate. I am certain that he is far 
better known in France and Belgium than in the 
United Kingdom. The other day an American art- 
critic, who did not know who I was, but was anxious 
to impress me with the fact that British art was 
altogether worthless, said vehemently — I had been 
trying to put in a word for Constable, Gainsborough, 
and Turner — said vehemently: 

"There was only one English painter who could 
ever paint. His name was Brown, and you probably 
never heard of him. He painted a picture called 
'Work.'" 

I retired from that discussion with decent discom- 
fiture. 

On the other hand, when I was hanging the pictures 
at the Madox Brown Exhibition at the Grafton 
Galleries the late R. A. M. Stevenson came in and, 
clutching my arm, proceeded to whirl me round 

228 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

in front of the walls. He poured out one of his splen- 
did floods of talk — and I think that he was the best 
talker that ever was, better than his cousin, Robert 
Louis, or better even than Henley, many of whose 
expletives and mannerisms "Bob" Stevenson re- 
tained. He poured out a flood of words before each 
of the pictures, going to prove in the most drastic 
manner that Madox Brown oug-ht never to have been 
a painter at all — he ought to have been a historical 
novelist. On the following day, which was Press 
Day, I was doing my best to explain the pictures 
to a crowd of journalists, when I was once more 
seized vehemently by the elbow, and there was Steven- 
son. He whirled me round the galleries and poured 
out a flood of talk before picture after picture. This 
time he proved as completely, as drastically, that 
Madox Brown was the only real English painter since 
Hogarth — the only national one, the only one who 
could paint, the only one who had any ideas worth the 
snufF of a candle. And, pointing to the little picture 
called "The Pretty Baa-Lambs," with the whole of 
his brown being, his curious, earnest, rather beaver- 
like face illuminated by excitement, he exclaimed: 

" By God ! the whole history of modern art begins 
with that picture. Corot, Manet, the Marises, all the 
Fontainebleau School, all the impressionists, never 
did anything but imitate that picture." 

So that Mr. Stevenson left me in a confusion that 
was odd and not so very unpleasant. I considered 

229 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

him at that time — and perhaps I still consider him — 
the finest critic of art that we ever produced. On 
the one day he said that Madox Brown "could not 
paint for nuts"; on the next he asservated that Madox 
Brown was greater than all the Italian primitives, 
French modernists, or than Prometheus, who first 
brought fire from heaven. And as I cannot imagine 
that Mr. Stevenson had any particular desire to 
please me, I can only leave the riddle at that. 

Shortly after the death of Madox Brown I left 
London, only to re-enter it as a permanent resident 
when twelve or thirteen years had gone by. And, 
gradually, all that "set" have died off, along with 
all the Victorian great figures. Ruskin died, Morris 
died, Christina and my aunt Lucy died, and Burne- 
Jones and only Mr. Holman Hunt remained of the 
painters. And yet it is odd how permanent to me 
they all seemed. Till the moment of Swinburne's 
death, till the moment of Meredith's, I had con- 
sidered them — I found it when I heard of their deaths 
— as being as permanent as the sun or the Mansion 
House. Thus each death came as a separate shock. 
So it was with the last death of all which I read of — 
only a few days ago while I was travelling in a distant 
country. 

It had been a long and tiresome journey, in a train 
as slow as the caravan of a Bedouin. We had jolted 
on and on over plain after plain. And then, with 

230 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

a tired and stertorous grunt, in a sudden and how 
much needed shaft of sunshine, the train came to a 
standstill, wearily, and as if it would never pluck 
up spirits again to drag along its tail of dusty car- 
riages. The station was bright pink, the window 
frames were bright emerald green; the porters wore 
bright blue uniforms; and one of them a bright 
scarlet cap. In the background — but no, under the 
shafts of sparkling light there was no background; 
it all jumped forward as if it were a flat, bright pattern 
covering a high wall — there was a landscape in checkers 
of little plots of ground. The squares of bare earth 
were of brighter pink than anything you will see in 
Devonshire; where the newly cut fodder had stood, 
the green was a pale bright emerald. The patches of 
tobacco were of a green more vivid; the maize more 
vivid still. The very cocks of hay, dotted about like 
ant-heaps, were purple. The draught oxen, bright 
yellow, stood before the long carts, painted bright 
blue, and panted in the unaccustomed heat. Peasant 
women in short green petticoats with blue velvet 
bodices and neckerchiefs of bright green, of sky-blue, 
of lemon-yellow, bore upon their heads purple baskets, 
or beneath coifs of sparkling white linen raked the 
purple hay on the green fields, or lifted up into the 
blue wagons bundles of fodder with forks that had 
bright red shafts. And all this color, in the dazzling, 
violent light, was hung beneath an absurd blue sky. 
It was the color of the blue houses one sees in the 

231 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

suburbs of Paris, and contained, blotted all over it, 
absurd pink and woolly German clouds, 

I closed my eyes. It was not that it was really 
painful, it was not that it w^as really disagreeable. 
All this richness, all this prosperity, seemed so stable 
and so long-established that in our transient world 
it suggested a lasting peace. But, coming out of 
our grays and half-tints of London, where nothing 
vivid ever occurs to disturb the eye, it was too over- 
whelming. It was — and the words came onto my 
lips at the very moment — too brave, too Pre-Raphael- 
ite! It was just as if Nature had set herself to do the 
thing well, and had done the thing so well that the 
eye couldn't possibly stand it. Pre-Raphaelite! That 
was what it all was. 

Desiring to rest my eyes, I turned them upon one 
of those newspapers that are so difficult to read, and 
there was conveyed to my mind the message: 

"Es wird uns telegraphiert aus London dass der 
Mahler Holman Hunt, der Vater des englischen Pre- 
raphaelismus, im 83ten. Jahre seines Lebens, ges- 
torben ist." 

("It is telegraphed to us out of London that the 
painter, Holman Hunt, the father of English Pre- 
Raphaelism, to-day, in the eighty-third year of his 
life, is dead.") 

I do not know whether there was something tele- 
pathic about Nature that she gave this brave Pre- 
Raphaelite show in Hessen-Nassau to frame for me 

232 




HOLMAN HUNT 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 



an announcement that called up images so distant 
and so dim of a painter — of a set of painters who, in 
their own day, decided to do the thing well — to do 
the thing so well that most beholders of their pictures 
still close their eyes and say that it is too much. For 
the odd thing is that these Pre-Raphaelites painted 
in the dim and murky squares of Bloomsbury. There 
was nothing Hessian about their environment; if 
they were not all Cockneys, they were townsmen 
to a man. 

And the most immediate image of Mr. Holman 
Hunt that comes to my mind is enshrined in a lamplit 
interior. There was Mr. Holman Hunt, resting after 
the labors of his day, with the curious, vivid, rugged 
head, the deep-set, illuminated eyes that were per- 
petually sending swift glances all over the room. 
There was also, I know, one of her Majesty's judges 
poring over the reproductions of some Etruscan vases; 
and there may have been other people. It was a 
tranquil interior of rather mellow shadows, and Mr. 
Holman Hunt, with the most ingenuously charming 
manner in the world, was engaged in damning — as 
it were in musing asides — all my family and their 
connections and myself. He was talking of the old 
times, of the forties and fifties, when he was known 
as Old Hunt and Millais as The Lamp Post, because 
he was so tall. And, uttering many things which 
may be found now in his autobiography, Mr. Hunt 
would let drop sentences like: 

233 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

"The Brotherhood used to meet pretty often at 
Rossetti's rooms, but, of course, Rossetti was a com- 
mon thief. . . ." 

"Your grandfather was then painting a picture 
called 'The Pretty Baa-Lambs,' but, of course, 
Madox Brown was a notorious liar. . . ." 

"These details may be interesting to you when you 
come to write the life of your grandfather, but, of 
course, you, as a person of no particular talent, setting 
out upon an artistic career, will die ignominiously of 
starvation. And so Millais and I, having discovered 
the secret of the wet, white ground, proceeded to 
swear an oath that we would reveal it to none other 
of the brethren." 

And so distractedly — so amiably, for the matter 
of that — were these damning "of courses" dropped 
into the great man's picturesque narrative, that it 
was not until after I had for two or three hours left 
the dim and comfortable lamplight of the room 
that I really realized that Mr. Hunt had stated that 
he considered Rossetti a thief, my grandfather a 
liar, and myself doomed to an infamous and needy 
death. How Mr. Hunt had arrived at this last con- 
clusion I do not know, for this happened twenty 
years ago, between the death and burial of Madox 
Brown, I having been sent to ask this friend of my 
grandfather's early years to attend his funeral. I 
was just nineteen at the time, so that I know quite 
well that what the great painter meant was not that 

234 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

he perceived traces of incipient villainy upon my 
countenance or of decadence in my non-existent 
writings, but that he really desired to warn me against 
the hardships of the artistic life, of which in middle 
life he tasted for so long and so bitterly. Similarly, 
when he said that Rossetti was a thief, he meant 
that the author of Jenny had borrowed some books 
of him and never returned them, so that they were 
sold at the sale of Rossetti's effects. And when he 
called my grandfather, not yet in his grave, a notorious 
liar, that signified that he was irritated by the phrase, 
"grandfather of Pre-Raphaelism," which was applied 
to Madox Brown in his obituaries. These had been 
circulated to the halfpenny evening press by a news 
agency. An industrious hack-writer had come upon 
this phrase in a work by Mr. Harry Quilter, no other 
writer at that date having paid any attention at all 
to Madox Brown's career. The phrase had afforded 
Madox Brown almost more explosive irritation than 
its repetition thus caused Mr. Holman Hunt. For, 
rightly or wrongly, just as Mr. Hunt considered him- 
self the father and grandfather of Pre-Raphaelism, 
as well as the only Pre-Raphaelite that counted, so 
Madox Brown considered himself much too great an 
artist to have been mixed up in a childish debating 
society called a brotherhood, and invented by a set 
of youths very much his juniors. But now, indeed, 
with the announcement, "Heute wird aus London 
telegraphiert," which the wires so generously flashed 
16 235 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

to the ends of the civiHzed earth, the Father of Pre- 
RaphaeHsm had passed away. For of all the Pre- 
Raphaelite brothers, Mr. Hunt was the only one who 
fully understood, who fully carried out, for better or 
for worse, for richer or for poorer, the canons of Pre- 
Raphaelism. It was Madox Brown who first painted 
bright purple haycocks — ^yes, bright purple ones — 
upon a bright green field. But he painted them like 
that because he happened to notice that when sunlight 
is rather red and the sky very blue, the shadowy side 
of green - gray hay is all purple. He noticed it, 
and he rendered it. It was a picturesque fact appeal- 
ing to an imagination that looked out for the pictu- 
resque. Mr. Holman Hunt rendered things with the 
avid passion of a seeker after truth; it was a hungry 
desire; it was a life force pushing him toward the 
heroic, toward all of the unexplored things in human 
experience that are as arid and as bitter as the un- 
explored fields of ice around the Pole. Just as the 
explorer, robbing those august regions of their mys- 
tery with his photographs and his projections, is 
inspired by the passion for those virgin mysteries, 
just as he earns at once our dislike by penetrating 
mysteries that should remain mysteries, if we are 
to remain comfortable, so with Mr. Holman Hunt. 
Inspired with the intense, unreasoning faith of the 
ascetic for the mysteries of revealed religion — inspired, 
too, with the intense and unreasoning desire of the 
ascetic for the rendering of truth, since he believed 

236 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

that truth and revealed reHgion were as much identical 
as are the one in three of the Trinity, so Mr. Holman 
Hunt supported the fiery suns of the desert, the thirsts 
of the day, the rigors of the night, the contempt of 
his compatriots, and the scorn of his time. He was 
endeavoring to prove that our Lord was a Semitic 
boy or an adult Jew inspired with the ecstasy of a 
modern French anarchist, that His Mother was a 
Bedouin woman of no particular distinction, or that 
the elders in the Temple were a set of Semitic sheiks 
dressed in aniline-dyed Manchester goods, burnouses, 
packed together in wooden tabernacles beneath a 
remorseless sun. This was the message of Mr. Holman 
Hunt to his generation, a message surely very salutary 
and very useful. For of its kind, and as far as it went, 
it meant clearness of thought, and clearness of thought 
in any department of life is the most valuable thing 
that a man can give to his day. The painter of "The 
Light of the World" dealt a very hard blow to the 
fashionable religion of his day. This the world of 
his youth understood very well. It declared Mr. 
Hunt to be an atheist, and, with Charles Dickens 
at its head, cried to the government for the imprison- 
ment of Mr. Hunt and his brethren. 

These things are, I suppose, a little forgotten now 
— or perhaps they all repose together on that hill 
where grows the herb Oblivion. I don't know. 
But round the romantic home of my childhood the 
opponents of Pre-Raphaelism seemed still to stalk 

237 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

like assassins with knives. There was a sort of Blue- 
beard called Frank Stone, R.A. God alone knows 
nowadays who Frank Stone, R.A., was! But Frank 
Stone said in the Athenesum of the year of grace 1850 
that the flesh of Pre-Raphaelite pictures was painted 
with strawberry jam. There was a veritable Giant 
Blunderbore called Grant, P. R.A. — ^who in the world 
was Grant, P. R.A. .^ — who, with forty thieves, all 
R.A.s, immolated the innocent pictures of Holman 
Hunt, Millais, D. G. R., Brown, and Collinson — who 
sent them home ripped up with nails, who never 
returned them at all, or who hung them next the ceiling 
in gloomy rooms one hundred and forty feet high. 
That, at least, was my early picture of the horrors 
that the Pre-Raphaelites had to endure. 

And the public certainly took its share, too. The 
good, indolent public of that day was not too indolent 
to take an interest in pictures, and it certainly very 
hotly disliked anything that had P.R.B. attached to it, 
perhaps because it was used to things with P.R.A. 
(Who was Grant, P.R.A. .?) People in those days, 
like people to-day, had tired eyes. They wanted 
nice, comfortable half-tones. They wanted undis- 
turbing pictures in which flesh, trees, houses, castles, 
the sky and the sea alike appeared to have been 
painted in pea-soup. Consequently, hay that appeared 
purple in the shadows, and flesh that seemed to have 
been painted with strawberry jam, upset them very 
much. They were simple, earnest people, those early 

238 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

Victorians, and had not yet learned the trick of avoiding 
disturbing thoughts and sights. Perhaps it was that 
the picture postcard had not yet been invented. It is 
incredible nowadays to think that any one would 
be in the least disturbed if a painter as great as Velas- 
quez should come along and paint you a scarlet land- 
scape with a pea-green sky. Nowadays we should care 
nothing at all. Only if he pushed himself really well, 
he would find himself elected A.R.A. at the third 
attempt, and his pictures would be bought by a doctor 
in Harley Street. He would be celebrated in a small 
afternoon tea circle. But the great public would never 
hear of him, and would never be disturbed by his 
scarlet grass and green sky. We should not indeed 
really care two pins if the president of the Royal 
Association should declare that the grass is bright 
scarlet and the sky green. We should just want to 
go on playing bridge. 

But the public of the Pre-Raphaelites was really 
worried. It felt that if these fellows were right, its 
eyesight must be wrong, and there is nothing more 
disturbing! It desired, therefore, that these painters 
should be suppressed. It didn't want them only to 
be ignored. They were disturbers of great principles. 
If they began by declaring that flesh looked like 
strawberry jam, when all the world knew that it 
looked like pea-soup, they would begin next to impugn 
the British Constitution, the morality of the Prince 
Consort, the Times newspaper, the Nonconformist 

239 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

conscience, the bench of Bishops, and the beauty of 
the crinoHne. There would be no knowing where 
they wouldn't get to. 

And, indeed, the worried public was perfectly 
right. Pre-Raphaelism may or may not have been 
important in the history of modern art; it was all- 
important in the development of modern thought. 
The amiable muddle-headedness of the crinoline 
period was perfectly right to be horribly worried 
when Millais exhibited a picture showing Christ 
obedient to His parents. You have to consider 
that in those days it was blasphemous, indecent, and 
uncomfortable to think about sacred personages at all. 
No one really liked to think about the Redeemer, 
and Millais showed them the Virgin kissing her Son. 
According to Victorian Protestant ideas the Mother 
of our Lord was a person whom you never mentioned 
at all. But Millais dragged her right into the fore- 
ground. You couldn't get away from her. She was 
kissing her little Son, and her little Son was obedient 
to her. Adolescence, family affection, subjection to 
His mother and father, or early occupations — all these 
things were obviously logical, but were very disturb- 
ing. They meant all sorts of revisions of judgment. 
It was not only that flesh looked like strawberry jam, 
but that the Saviour was a man with necessities, the 
craving for sympathy, and the vulnerability of a man. 
These facts Millais forced upon the attention of the 
public. 

240 




SIR JOHN MILLAIS 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

And not being of the stern temper of Mr. Hunt, 
Millais bent before the storm of popular opinion. 
He was afraid that Charles Dickens would get him 
imprisoned. He changed the figure of the Virgin 
so that no longer does she comfort her Son with a 
kiss. Millais could alter his picture, but nothing 
in this world could ever have forced Mr. Hunt to 
bend. In consequence, Millais, a very great painter, 
climbed an easy road to affluence, and died in the 
chair once occupied by Grant, P.R.A. Mr. Hunt 
pursuing his sterner course, seeking avidly for truth 
as it must have appeared, was for long years shunned 
by patrons, and hard put to it to live at all. There 
have, I think, been few such struggles in the cause 
of any conscience, and never with such a fierce and 
iron determination has any painter, in the teeth of 
a violent opposition, fettered his art so to serve the 
interests of religion and of truth. 

This religiosity which Mr. Holman Hunt, before 
even Darwin, Huxley, and other Victorian figures, 
so effectively destroyed, was one of the scourges 
of the dismal period which to-day we call the Victo- 
rian era. And if Mr. Hunt destroyed the image of 
Simon Peter as the sort of artist's model that you 
see on the steps of Calabrian churches, furtively 
combing out, with the aid of a small, round mirror, 
long white hairs depending from his head and face 
— these hairs being the only portion of him that has 
ever been washed since his birth — if Mr. Hunt de- 

241 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

stroyed this figure, with its attitudes learned on the 
operatic stage, its blanket revealing opulently moulded 
forms, and its huge property keys extended toward 
a neo-Gothic heaven — if Mr. Hunt gave us instead 
(I don't know that he ever did, but he may have done) 
a Jewish fisherman pulling up dirty-looking fish on 
the shores of a salt-encrusted and desolate lake — 
Mr. Hunt, in the realms of modern thought, enor- 
mously aided the discovery of wireless telegraphy, 
and in no way damaged the prestige of the occupant 
of St. Peter's chair. 

This truism may appear a paradox. And yet 
nothing is more true than that clearness of thought 
in one department of life stimulates clearness of 
thought in another. The great material develop- 
ments of the end of last century did not only succeed 
the great realistic developments that had preceded 
them in the arts. The one was the logical corollary 
of the other. Just as you cannot have a healthy 
body in which one of the members is unsound, so 
you cannot have a healthy national life in the realms 
of thought unless in all the departments of life you 
have sincere thinkers, and this is what Mr. Hunt 
undoubtedly was — a sincere thinker. To say that he 
was the greatest painter of his day might be super- 
fluous; he was certainly the most earnest beyond all 
comparison. That we should dislike the vividness 
of his color is perhaps the defect of our degenerate 
eyes, which see too little of the sunlight. And such 

242 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

a painting as that of the strayed sheep on the edge of 
the Fairhght diff, near Pitt — such a painting is sufficient 
to estabhsh the painter's claims to gifts of the very 
greatest. You have the sunHt sheep, you have the 
dangerous verge of the hill, you have the sea far below, 
and from these things you find awakened in you such 
emotions as Providence has rendered you capable of. 
This, without doubt, is the province of art — a province 
which perhaps Mr. Hunt, in his hunger and thirst 
after righteousness, unduly neglected. 

Of pictures of his at all in this absolute genre, I 
can recall otherwise only one, representing the deck 
of a steamer at night. Mr. Hunt, in fact, set himself 
the task of being rather a pioneer than an artist. 
His fame, the bulking of his personality in the eyes 
of posterity, as with all other pioneers, will no doubt 
suffer. But when he gave Mr. Gambart what Mr. 
Gambart complained was **a great ugly goat" instead 
of a pretty, religious picture, with epicene angels, 
curled golden hair and long nightgowns, Mr. Hunt 
was very certainly benefiting the life of his day. 
And, indeed, this is a terrifying and suggestive pict- 
ure. But this great man cared very little for beauty, 
which is not that which, by awakening untabulated 
and indefinite emotions, makes, indefinitely, more 
proper men of us. Had he cared more for this he 
would have been a greater artist; he might have been 
a smaller man. Beauty, I think, he never once men- 
tions in his autobiography. But truth and righteous- 

243 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

ness, as he understood it, were always on his Hps as 
they were always in his heart. In spite of the acerbity 
of his utterances, in spite of the apparent egotism 
of his autobiography, which to the unthinking might 
appear a bitterly vainglorious book, I am perfectly 
ready to declare myself certain that Mr. Holman Hunt 
was, in the more subtle sense, an eminently unselfish 
man. The "I" that is so eternal in his autobiography 
is not the "I" that was William Holman Hunt. It 
was all that he stood for — the principles, the hard life, 
the bitter endurance, the splendid record of young 
friendships, the aims, the achievements. It was this 
that Mr. Hunt desired to have acknowledged. In his 
autobiography he did himself perhaps less than jus- 
tice; in his paintings, too, he did himself perhaps less 
than justice; but in the whole course of his life, from 
his strugglings away from the merchant's stool to his 
death, which is "telegraphed to us" in the obscurest 
of Hessian villages, he never betrayed his ascetic's 
passion. It was to this passion that his egotism was a 
tribute. From his point of view, Rossetti was not a 
good man, because he was not a religious painter 
who had journeyed into Palestine in search of truth. 
He never even went to Florence to see where Beatrice 
lived. If Mr. Hunt called Rossetti a thief, it was 
because he desired to express this artistically immoral 
fact, and he expressed it clumsily as one not a master 
of words. And, similarly, if he called Madox Brown 
a liar, it was because Madox Brown was not a painter 

244 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 



of his school of reHgious thought. His aim was not 
to prevent other persons buying pictures of Madox 
Brown or Rossetti; his aim was not to prevent Madox 
Brown or Rossetti prospering, or even becoming presi- 
dents of the Royal Academy. He desired to point out 
that the only way to aesthetic salvation was to be a 
believing Pre-Raphaehte. And there was only one 
Pre-Raphaelite— that was Mr. Holman Hunt. Any 
one without his faith must, he felt, be a bad man. 
And in a dim and muddled way he tried to express it. 
At other times he would call these rival painters the 
best and noblest of fellows, or the one man in the 
world to whom to go for advice or sympathy. And this 
indeed was the main note of his life, he himself having 
been so companionable, as fine a fellow, and as good 
to go to for advice. But, being a painter, he had to 
look for shadows, and not being much of a hand with 
the pen or the tongue, if he could not find them he 
had to invent them. That, in the end, was the bottom 
of the matter. 

I permit myself these words upon a delicate sub- 
ject, since Mr. Hunt's autobiography, which must 
necessarily be his most lasting personal memorial, 
does so very much less than justice to the fineness 
of his nature. This hardly all his hardships and 
privations could warp at all. And I permit them to 
myself the more readily since I may, without much 
immodesty, consider myself the most vocal of the 
clan which Mr. Hunt dimly regarded as the Opposi- 

245 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 



tlon to his claim to be regarded as the founder of 
Pre-Raphaehsm. But I think I never did advance 
— it was never my intention to advance — any sugges- 
tion that the true inwardness of Pre-Raphaehsm, 
the exact rendering, hair for hair of the model; the 
passionate hunger and thirst for even accidental truth, 
the real caput mortumn of Pre-Raphaelism, was ever 
expressed by any one else than by the meticulously 
earnest painter and great man, whose death was 
telegraphed from the dim recesses of London into the 
chess-board pattern of sunlit Pre-Raphaelite Hessian 
harvest lands. May the fields to which he has gone 
prove such very bright places where, to his cour- 
ageous eyes, his truth shall be very vivid and prevail! 

Madox Brown has been dead for twenty years now, 
or getting on for that. I would not say that the happi- 
est days of my life were those that I spent in his studio, 
for I have spent in my life days as happy since then; 
but I will say that Madox Brown was the finest man 
I ever knew. He had his irascibilities, his fits of 
passion when, tossing his white head, his mane of 
hair would fly all over his face, and when he would 
blaspheme impressively after the manner of our great- 
grandfathers. And in these fits of temper he would 
frequently say the most unjust things. But I think 
that he was never either unjust or ungenerous in cold 
blood, and I am quite sure that envy had no part 
at all in his nature. Like Rossetti and like William 

246 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

Morris, in his very rages he was nearest to generosities. 
He would rage over an injustice to some one else to 
the point of being bitterly unjust to the oppressor. 
I do not think that I would care to live my life over 
again — I have had days that I would not again face 
for a good deal — but I would give very much of what 
I possess to be able, having still such causes for satis- 
faction as I now have in life, to be able to live once 
more some of those old evenings in the studio. 

The lights would be lit, the fire would glow between 
the red tiles; my grandfather would sit with his 
glass of weak whiskey and water in his hand, and 
would talk for hours. He had anecdotes more lavish 
and more picturesque than any man I ever knew. 
He would talk of Beau Brummel, who had been 
British Consul at Calais when Madox Brown was 
born there; of Paxton, who built the Crystal Palace, 
and of the mysterious Duke of Portland, who lived 
underground, but who, meeting Madox Brown in 
Baker Street outside Druces', and hearing that 
Madox Brown suffered from gout, presented him 
with a large quantity of colchicum grown at Wel- 
beck. . . . 

Well, I would sit there on the other side of the 
rustling fire, listening, and he would revive the splen- 
did ghosts of Pre-Raphaelites, going back to Cor- 
nelius and Overbeck and to Baron Leys and Baron 
[Wappers, who taught him first to paint in the romantic, 
igrand manner. He would talk on. Then Mr. WilHam 

247 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

Rossetti would come in from next door but one, and 
they would begin to talk of Shelley and Browning 
and Mazzini and Napoleon III., and Mr. Rossetti, 
sitting in front of the fire, would sink his head nearer 
and nearer to the flames. His right leg would be 
crossed over his left knee, and, as his head went down, 
so, of necessity, his right foot would come up and out. 
It would approach nearer and nearer to the fire-irons 
which stood at the end of the fender. The tranquil 
talk would continue. Presently the foot would touch 
the fire-irons and down they would go into the fender 
with a tremendous clatter of iron. Madox Brown, 
half dozing in the firelight, would start and spill some 
of his whiskey. I would replace the fire-irons in their 
stand. 

The talk would continue, Mr. Rossetti beginning 
again to sink his head toward the fire, and explaining 
that, as he was not only bald but an Italian, he liked 
to have his head warmed. Presently, bang! would go 
the fire-irons again. Madox Brown would lose some 
more whiskey and would exclaim: 

"Really, William!" 

Mr. Rossetti would say: 

"I am very sorry. Brown." 

I would replace the fire-irons again, and the talk 
would continue. And then for the third time the 
fire-irons would so down. Madox Brown would 
hastily drink what little whiskey remained to him, 
and, jumping to his feet, would shout: 

248 



DEATHS AND DEPARTURES 

"God damn and blast you, William! can't you be 
more careful ?" 

To which his son-in-law, always the most utterly 
calm of men, would reply: 

"Really, Brown, your emotion appears to be 
excessive. If Fordie would leave the fire-irons lying 
in the fender there would be no occasion for them to 
fall." 

The walls were covered with gilded leather; all 
the doors were painted dark green; the room was 
very long, and partly filled by the great picture that 
was never to be finished, and, all in shadow, in the 
distant corner was the table covered with bits of 
string, curtain-knobs, horseshoes, and odds and ends 
of iron and wood. 



XII 

HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

ABOUT six months after Madox Brown's death I 
• went permanently into the country, where I 
remained for thirteen years, thus losing almost all 
touch with intellectual or artistic life. Yet, one very 
remarkable pleasure did befall me during the early 
days of that period of seclusion. Mr. Edward Garnett, 
at that time literary adviser to the most enterprising 
publisher of that day, came down to the village, 
bringing w^ith him a great basket of manuscripts that 
had been submitted to his firm. It was a Sunday 
evening. We were all dressed more or less mediaevally, 
after the manner of true disciples of socialism of the 
William Morris school. We were drinking, I think, 
mead out of cups made of bullock's horn. Mr. 
Garnett was reading his MSS. Suddenly he threw 
one across to me. 

"Look at that," he said. 

I think that then I had the rarest literary pleasure 
of my existence. It was to come into contact with a 
spirit of romance, of adventure, of distant lands, 
and with an English that was new, magic, and unsur- 

250 



HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

passed. It sang like music; it overwhelmed me like 
a great warm wave of the sea, and it was as clear 
as tropical sunlight falling into deep and scented 
forests of the East. For this MS. was that of Al- 
mayers Folly, the first book of Mr. Joseph Conrad, 
which he had sent up for judgment, sailing away 
himself, as I believe, for the last time, upon a ship 
going toward the East. So was Joseph Conrad 
"discovered." 

But that was the day of discoveries. It was an 
exciting, a wonderful time. In those years Mr. 
Rudyard Kipling burst upon the world with a shower 
of stars like those of a certain form of rocket. Mr. 
Zangwill was "looming large." To-Day was a won- 
derful periodical; it serialized the first long novel 
of Mr. H, G. Wells. Mr. Anthony Hope was going 
immensely strong. Mr. J. M. Barrie was beginning 
to "boom." Mr. Crockett was also "discovered," 
and Mrs. Craigie and the authors of the Pseudonym 
Library, with its sulphur-yellow covers that penetrated 
like a fumigation into every corner of Europe. Ma- 
demoiselle Ixe must have found millions of readers. 
And it was really the talk of the town. Mr. Gladstone, 
I think, wrote a postcard about it. Then there was 
Olive Schreiner, who was a prophetess, and who 
wrote wonderfully well about South Africa, and lec- 
tured the Almighty for the benefit of Hampstead. 

The tone of all this new literature was, of course, 
very different from that of Pre-Raphaelism. It was 
17 251 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 



in many ways more vivid, more actual, and more of 
every day, just as it was certainly less refined and less 
precious. And I must confess that I at least revelled 
in this new note. Being very young and properly 
humble, all these appearances filled me with delight 
and with enthusiasm. It was as entrancing to me to 
read the "Wheels of Chance" in the badly printed col- 
umns of To-Day as it was to read the Dolly Dialogues 
on the green paper of the Westminster Gazette, and it 
was only a more wonderful thing to be able to read 
"The Nigger of the Narcissus," which was the last 
serial to appear in Henley's National Review. I was 
ready to accept almost anybody and anything, though 
at the one end of the scale I could not swallow Three 
Men in a Boat, or, at the other, Dreams, by Olive 
Schreiner. What was called in those days the new 
humor appeared to me as vulgar as the works of 
Albert Smith and not half so funny. On the other 
hand, the new seriousness appeared to me to be more 
funny than either, particularly when Miss Schreiner 
took to arguing with God. I remember saying as 
much to a young Hampstead lady who came near to 
being my first— and who knows whether she would 
not have been my only— love. I had seen her home 
from my grandfather's, and we walked up and down 
before her garden gate discussing this work, which 
struck me as so comic. She ended by saying that I 
was as vulgar as I was stupid. So there that romance 
came to an end ! She was a very earnest and charm- 

252 



HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

ingly ridiculous person, and is now married to an 
eminent stockbroker. But from this tender reminis- 
cence I gather that I must have had limits in my 
appreciations of the bubbling literature of that day. 
But the limits must have been singularly wide. I 
suppose those works really took me out of the rather 
stifling atmosphere of Pre-Raphaelism, just as in 
earlier days I used to lock myself in the coal-cellar 
in order to read Dick Harkaway and Sweeney Todd, 
the Demon Barber, and other penny-dreadfuls. Then, 
I was reacting — and I am sure healthily — against 
being trained for the profession of a genius. 

But I can remember with what enormous enthu- 
siasm I used to read the little shilling, paper-bound, 
bluish books which contain the first stories of Mr. 
Rudyard Kipling. Mr. Kipling himself is of an 
origin markedly Pre-Raphaelite. He is a nephew 
of Burne-Jones, and I suppose that the writings of 
poor '*B. V. Thomson," the very Pre-Raphaelite 
author of The City of Dreadful Night — that these 
works more profoundly influenced the author of 
The Man Who Would Be King than any other pieces 
of contemporary literature. I do not know whether 
I knew this at the time, but I can very well remember 
coming up by a slow train from Hythe and attempting 
at one and the same time to read the volume of stories 
containing " Only a Subaltern " and to make a single 
pipe of shag last the whole of that long journey. 
And I can remember that when I came at almost 

253 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

the same moment to Charing Cross and the death 
of the subaltern I was crying so hard that a friendly 
ticket collector asked me if I was very ill, and saw 
me into a cab. 

What, then, has become of all these fine enthu- 
siasms — for assuredly I was not the only one capable 
of enthusiasms ? What has become of the young men 
with the long necks and the red ties ? What has be- 
come of all the young maidens with the round shoul- 
ders, the dresses of curtain serge, and the amber neck- 
laces ? Where are all those of us who admired Henley 
and his gang ? Where are all the adorers of the Pre- 
Raphaelites ? Where are all the poets of the Rhymer's 
Club ? Where are all the authors of To-Day^ of The 
IcUer, and The Outlook in its brilliant days ? Some- 
body — I think it was myself — made a couplet running: 

" Let him begone !" the mighty Wyndham cried. 
And Crosland vanished and The Outlook died. 

One had such an enthusiasm for the work of Mr. 
Crosland in those days, and a little later. 

And where is it all gone ? And why ? I do not 
know — or perhaps I do. I went, as I say, for thirteen 
years into the country. I lived entirely, or almost 
entirely, among peasants. This w^as, of course, due 
to that idealizing of the country life which was so 
extraordinarily prevalent in the earlier nineties among 
the disciples of William Morris and other Cockneys. 
It was a singularly unhealthy frame of mind which 

254 



HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

caused a number of young men, totally unfitted for it, 
to waste only too many good years of their lives in 
posing as romantic agriculturists. They took small 
holdings, lost their hay crops, saw their chickens die, 
and stuck to it with grim obstinacy until, William 
Morris and Morrisism being alike dead, their feelings 
found no more support from the contagion of other 
enthusiasms. So they have mostly returned to useful 
work, handicapped by the loss of so many good years, 
and generally with ruined digestions; for the country, 
with its atrocious food and cooking, is, in England, 
the home of dyspepsia. 

I suppose that is why England is known abroad 
as das Pillenland — le pays des pilules — the land of 
patent medicines. 

So that, although I must write it down — atque ego 
in Arcadia vixi — I am able to see, having returned 
after this interval to a city where the things of the 
spirit have as much place as can be found in the 
country of *' price per thou" — I am able, as the French 
would say, to constater how enormous a change has 
come over the face of the only city in the world 
where, in spite of everything, life is worth living. 
For, after all, London is the only place in the world 
where there is real freedom and real solitude, where 
no man's eye is upon you, since no man cares twopence 
what you are, where you may be going, or what will 
become of you. And there we have it, the reason why 
London is so good a place for mankind, and a place 

255 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

so bitter bad at once for the arts and ideas. Rushing 
about as we do in huge crowds, we have no time for 
any soHdarity; faced as we are by an incredible 
competition, we have no heart in us for self-sacrifice, 
and at it as we are all day and half the night we have 
no time for reflection. Yet it is only of reflection 
that ideas are born, and it is only by self-sacrifice 
and by self-sacrifice again that the arts can flourish. 
We must write much and sacrifice much of what we 
have written; we must burn whole volumes; deferring 
to the ideas of our brother artists whom we trust, 
we must sacrifice other whole volumes, to achieve such 
a little piece of perfection that, if that too were burned, 
the ashes of it would not fill a doll's thimble. Yet 
before us hangs always now the scroll with the fateful 
words, "price per thou." 

The mention of this wonderful contrivance will 
extort from a French or a German writer a look of 
utter incredulity. They will think that you are 
"pulling their legs." And then gradually you will 
observe to be passing into their faces an expression 
of extremely polite, of slightly ironical, admiration: 

"Ah, yes," they will say, "you English are so 
practical." 

And indeed we are very practical. But it is only 
on the material side that we even begin to consider 
ways and means. Thus, lately we had an enlighten- 
ing and lively discussion as to the length a "book" 
should have. (By "book" a six-shilling novel should, 

256 



HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

I suppose, be understood.) We were instructed that 
the public desires, nay, insists on, a certain fixed 
amount of reading matter. You might weigh a book 
in scales, you might measure its lines of bourgeois or 
pica type with a foot-rule. But your book must be 
able to be assayed either by weight or by measure. 
Indeed, nowadays your publisher, when he com- 
missions a novel, insists in his agreement that it shall 
be seventy-five thousand words in length. Just 
imagine! You might want to write the chronicle of 
a family, as Thackeray did in The Newcomes, and 
you must do it all in 75,000 words. Or you might 
want to write the story of how a young man got engaged 
to a young woman during five accidental meetings in 
omnibuses. And, if you cannot do it in 4,000 words, 
so as to make it a "short story" for one of the popular 
magazines, you must extend it to 75,000 or there will 
be, every publisher will tell you, "no market for it." 
In the earlier nineties the publisher cheated his 
authors as a rule tyrannically enough, and, since no 
author ever looked at an agreement in those days, 
things went smoothly. The publisher, on the other 
hand, considered sometimes the quality of the work 
that he published, and seldom thought about the 
length of the book. Indeed, everything was then 
made more easy for the author's activities. When I 
published, at the age of eighteen, my first novel, it 
was borne in upon me that there was no need to be 
acquainted with the mysteries of grammar — or, rather, 

257 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

of syntax, since in England there is no such thing as 
grammar — of syntax, of spelling, or of punctuation. 
The author of that day could write exactly as he 
pleased; he could make mistakes as to dates; he 
could rechristen his heroine by inadvertance four 
times in as many chapters. But he knew that he 
would have three succeeding sets of proofs and revises, 
and that each proof and each revise would be gone 
through with an almost incredible care by a proof- 
reader who would be a man of the highest education 
and of a knowledge almost encyclopaedic. I once by 
a slip of the pen wrote the name of the painter of the 
" Primavera," Buonarotti. Sure enough the proof 
came back marked in the margin: "Surely there is 
no picture of this name by Michael Angelo. Query 
Botticelli r' So that, indeed, in the nineties, and 
before that, one had a sense not only of dignity and 
luxury, but of security. And this was very good 
for writing. 

Consider where we are now! In the case of the last 
novel but one that I published I received from the 
publisher the most singular and the most insolent 
document that I think an author could possibly 
receive. This requested me to mark with red ink 
any printer's error and with black my own changes 
in the text. Just think of what this means! An 
author, when he is correcting his proofs, if he is any- 
where near worth his salt, is in a state of the most 
extreme tension. It is his last chance for getting his 

258 



HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

phrases musical or his words exactly right; it is an 
operation usually more trying than the actual writing 
of a book. And into this intense abstraction there is, 
as it were, to come the voice of a damned publisher 
exclaiming: "Red ink, if you please; that hyphen is 
a printer's error." Nowadays, indeed, the publisher 
only allows his author one proof and no revises unless 
the author makes a horrible row about it. And the 
publisher's proofreader seems to have disappeared 
altogether. Last March I received three sets of proofs 
— forty-eight pages — in which the printer had uni- 
formly spelled the word receive wrong. Now I know 
how to spell receive, and so does my typist. Yet it 
is a matter as to which one always has a lingering 
doubt. So that when nine times in forty-eight pages 
I found the "i" preceding the "e" I was frightened 
and turned to a dictionary. But do you imagine 
that the "reader for the press" had once noticed this .? 
Not a bit of it. The whole forty-eight pages were 
guiltless of a speck from his pen, and after that I 
had my nerves perpetually on the stretch to find out 
and to examine all words like believe or deceive. 
My mind was in a woful state of jangle and exaspera- 
tion, and the one critic who appeared to carefully 
have read the book remarked that I had split an in- 
finitive. It is not that this particular thing so par- 
ticularly matters; it is that the whole spirit is so 
atrocious and so depressing. The half-ruined libraries, 
we are told, badger the unfortunate publisher; the 

259 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

unfortunate publisher has beaten down the unfor- 
tunate printer until, I am told, the printing schedule 
of to-day is only hfty-five per cent, of what it was in 
1890. As a consequence the printer will only send 
one set of proofs and no revises. He sacks any proof- 
reader whose competence commands a decent wage, 
so that all the really efficient "readers for the press" 
are said to be employed by the newspapers. 

And along with all this there has gone the tremen- 
dous increase in the cost of living and the enormous 
increase of the public indifference to anything in the 
nature of the arts. This last — and possibly both of 
these factors — began with the firing of the first shot 
in the Boer War. That was the end of everything — 
of the Pre-Raphaelites, of the Henley gang, of the 
New Humor, of the Victorian Great Figure, and of 
the last traces of the mediaeval superstition that man 
might save his soul by the reading of good books. 

Africa has been called the grave of reputations. 
South Africa has bitterly revenged itself upon us for 
our crimes. It was undoubtedly the Rand millionaire 
who began to set the pace of social life so immensely 
fast. And the South African War meant the final 
installation of the Rand millionaire in Mayfair, which 
is the centre of English — and possibly of European 
and American — social life. The Rand millionaire 
was almost invariably a Jew; and whatever may be 
said for or against the Jew as a gainer of money, 
there is no doubt that, having got it, he spends it 

260 



HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

with an extraordinary lavishness, so that the whole 
tone of EngHsh society really changed at about this 
time. No doubt the coming of the motor-car, of the 
telephone, of the thousand and one pleasant little inven- 
tions of which no one had any idea in the nineteenth 
century — no doubt the coming of all these little things 
that have rendered life so gay, so sensuous, and so 
evanescent — all these little things have played their 
part in adding immensely to the cost of life if one has 
to live at all as pleasantly as one's neighbors. But 
they are the accident; it is the people who set the 
measure of the amount to which these luxuries are to 
be indulged in; it is those people who, in essence, 
rule our lives. 

It is all very well to say that luxury — which is the 
culture of life — is neither here nor there in the world 
of the arts or the ideas. My German great-grand- 
mother, the wife of the Biirgermeister of one of the 
capital cities of Germany, could never get over what 
appeared to her a disastrous new habit that was begin- 
ning to be adopted in Germany toward the end of her 
life, about 1780. She said that it was sinful, that it 
was extravagant, that it would lead to the downfall of 
the German nation. This revolutionary new habit 
was none other than that of having a dining-room. 
In those days Germany was so poor a country that 
even though my great-grandparents were considered 
wealthy people they were always accustomed to 
eat their meals in the bedroom. There was, that is 

261 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

to say, only one room and a kitchen In their house. 
The beds of the whole family were in niches in the 
walls surrounding the living-room, and it was here 
that they ate, slept, changed their clothes, or received 
their guests. The families of merchants less wealthy 
even cooked in their bedrooms. This appeared to 
my great-grandmother the only virtuous arrange- 
ment. And it was no doubt in the same spirit that 
Madox Brown considered it a proof of decadent 
luxury to wash one's hands more than three times a 
day. Nowadays, I suppose, we should consider 
my great-grandmother's virtue a disgusting affair, 
and one that, because It was Insanitary, was also 
Immoral, or at least anti-social; while my grand- 
father, who washed his hands only three times a day 
— before breakfast, lunch, and dinner — would be 
considered as only just scraping through the limits 
of cleanliness. Yet the price of soap is increasing 
daily. 

It may well be said: Why could my German 
grandfather when he married not have gone on 
eating his meals in his bedroom after the patriarchal 
manner .'' But to say so would argue a serious want 
of knowledge of the creature that man Is. He would 
have been Intolerably miserable; his wife would 
have been Intolerably miserable; his children would 
have been miserable and crestfallen among their 
playmates, for by that time — say a hundred years 
ago — all the neighbors had dining-rooms. So that 

262 



HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

the problem before my grandfather was to set his 
printing presses to work with redoubled speed and so 
to earn money enough to build for his wife and his 
children a sufficiently large house. And so he did, 
so that when he died he had not only bought the 
very large town house of a Westphalian nobleman, 
but he was able to leave to each of his fourteen chil- 
dren the sum of ;^3,750 — which, taken in the aggregate, 
represented a very large fortune for a German of the 
forties. But, then, four hundred a year in the eighties 
was considered sufficient for a man to marry on in 
London. It is not enough for a bachelor nowadays, 
if he is to live with any enjoyment. 

And the artist must live with enjoyment if his 
work is to be sound and good. He ought, if he is 
to know life, to be able to knock at all doors; he 
ought to be able to squander freely upon occasion; 
he ought to be able to riot now and then. It is no 
good saying that he ought to be able to live with his 
muse, as with his love, in a cottage. Uun et V autre 
se disenty but though it is very well to live with love 
in a cottage in your young years when the world is a 
funny place, and the washing-up of dishes such a 
humorous incident as makes of life a picnic, the 
writer who passes his life at this game will be in the 
end but a poor creature, whether as a man or a 
writer. Or, no, he may make a very fine man of the 
type of little St. Francis of the Birds. But he will 
be a writer purely doctrinaire. And for a writer to 

263 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

be doctrinaire is the end of him as an artist. He 
may make an excellent pamphleteer. 

This is very much what has happened to English 
literary life. The English writer appears to me — 
in the pack, for obviously there are the exceptions, 
mostly of an old-fashioned order — in the pack like 
a herd of hungry wolves. Yet, unlike the wolf, he 
is incapable of herding to any sensible purpose. 
The goodness of the Pre-Raphaelite movement was 
its union in a common devotion to the arts. Its 
actual achievements may have been very small. I 
should not like if I were put upon my critical judg- 
ment to say that either Rossetti or Holman Hunt, 
either Swinburne or William Morris, Millais or Burne- 
Jones, or, for the matter of that, my grandfather, 
were first-rate artists. But their effect in heighten- 
ing the prestige and the glamour of the arts was very 
wonderful, and remains, for the Continent, if not 
for England, a wonderful thing too. Similarly with 
Henley's crowd of friends. Their union was very 
close, though not so close as that of the Pre-Raphaelite 
circle. Their devotion to a sort of practical art was 
very great too, though it was not so conscious as that 
of Flaubert and his ring. Henley, at least sub- 
consciously, taught his followers that the first business 
of art is to interest, and the second, to interest, and 
the third, again — to interest. And I think that nearly 
all that is vital, actual, and alive in English work of 
to-day is due to the influence of Henley and his friends, 

264 



HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

just as I am perfectly certain that the two first-class 
purely imaginative writers of England of to-day — 
Mr. Henry James and Mr. Joseph Conrad — are the 
direct products artistically of Turgeniev and of 
Flaubert. It is mortifying to have to consider that 
each of these great writers is a foreigner. But so it is, 
and I should rather imagine that neither of these 
distinguished foreigners has ever heard the phrase 
that I have in this place so often used. 

And great though Pre-Raphaelism was as an in- 
fluence, great though Henleyism is as an influence, 
yet each of these influences left behind it a curse that 
has miasmatically aff'ected the English world of 
letters. 

I remember — years ago before I went into the 
country — sitting in one of those distressingly un- 
pleasant French restaurants of Soho that even in 
those days these superior and Morris-influenced 
writers considered as being at once romantic and 
satisfactory — I remember sitting listening to a group 
of my fellow-socialists of that type. I was always 
frightened of my companions, they were so bitterly 
contemptuous of me if I failed to know exactly what 
was the proper doctrine about any point of the Ideal 
Commonwealth, or as to what sort of clothes Dante 
wore at Ravenna. Yes, I was frightened; and sud- 
denly it came into my head to understand that a 
temporal tyranny might be a bad thing, but that the 
intellectual tyranny that my young friends would set 

265 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

up, when their social revolution came round the corner 
Hke the three-horse omnibus — that this intellectual 
tyranny would be infinitely worse than anything that 
Ivan the Terrible could ever have devised. For these 
young men, my companions, would keep all the good 
things of life for those who understood what would 
happen to babies in the Ideal State, for those who 
knew what Beatrice ate on the morning before she 
met Dante for the first time, for those who had the 
"Cuchullain Saga," the ''Saga of Grettir the Strong,'* 
and possibly **Ossian" and "News from Nowhere" 
by heart. As for me, I never could understand any- 
thing at all about the economic conditions of the 
Ideal State. Most of the Celtic and Scandinavian 
epics appeared to me to be intolerably long and 
amateurish productions of dull peasants who occa- 
sionally produced passages of brilliancy accidentally 
surpassing anything that was ever written or ever 
will be. And, as for "News from Nowhere'* . . . 
So, looking at my contemptuous young companions, 
each with his soft frieze coat, the pockets of which 
suggested that they contained many apples; each 
with his low collar, each with his red tie, and looking 
at the dirty table-cloths, the cheap knives, the cheap 
and poisonous claret, I felt suddenly guilt, humihty, 
and intense dread; I felt that I was a Philistine! I 
felt that every moment that I sat there I might be 
found out and conveyed swiftly to the chilling dun- 
geons of the Ideal State. I seemed to hear from 

266 



HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

round the corner the rattle of the three-horse 'bus. 
I seemed to catch in the eyes around that table a 
threatening gleam as if they suspected that I was a 
sort of spy at that banquet of conspirators. 

I fled — into the country. Looking at the matter 
now, I perceive that Henley was responsible for this — 
Henley and his piratical gang. These people had 
struck me as rough and unduly boisterous when I 
went to them out of a Pre-Raphaelite household. 
But, my grandfather being dead, I suddenly reacted. 
I did not know then, but I know now, that my brain 
was singing to me: 

"Under the bright and starry sky 
Dig my grave and let me lie." 

Only I wanted to have some tussles with the "good 
brown earth" before that hilltop should receive me. 
Well, we have most of us found the "good brown 
earth" part of a silly pose — but I am not sorry. It 
was Henley and his friends who introduced into the 
English writing mind the idea that a man of action 
was something fine and a man of letters a sort of 
castrato. They went jumping all over the earth, 
they "jumped the blind baggage" in the United States, 
they played at being tramps in Turkey, they died in 
Samoa, they debauched the morals of lonely border 
villages. You see what it was — they desired to be 
men of action, and certainly they infected me with 
the desire, and I am very glad of it, just as I am 
18 267 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

very glad that the intolerable boredom of a country 
life without sport or pursuit taught me better in time. 
With the idea that a writer should have been a 
man of action before he begins to write I am cordially 
in agreement; indeed, I doubt whether any writer 
has ever been thoroughly satisfactory unless he has 
once had some sort of normal existence. No greater 
calamity could befall one than to be trained as a genius. 
For the writer looks at life and does not share it. 
This is his calamity; this is his curse. If Shakespeare 
had not held horses outside a theatre or taken an 
interest in commercial enterprises, or whatever it 
was of a normal sort that he did before he wrote his 
first play, I think it is certain that the Baconians 
would not to-day be troubling their heads about him. 
He would have remained a poet of about the calibre 
of Fletcher, who was a very beautiful and poetical 
soul. Shakespeare had a soul not a bit more poetic, 
but he was of his world and he knew life. Hence he 
had not only the gifts of a poet, but the knowledge 
of how to invent along the lines of probability, and 
the one faculty is as essential to the perfect work of 
art as is the other. And Shakespeare had the im- 
mense advantage of belonging to a circle — to a circle 
that praised art high, that troubled its head about the 
technical side of things, and a circle that troubled 
itself very little about its social position. Shakes- 
peare — or whoever it was — wrote the ballad be- 
ginning: 

268 



HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

"It was a lording's daughter, 
The fairest one of three," 

in which a learned man and a soldier contend for the 
favor of an earl's daughter. They put up a fairly 
equal fight of it, so that for the moment I do not 
remember which got the upper hand. But do you 
imagine that an English writer of to-day would give 
a man of letters a show if he had to picture him as the 
rival of an officer in the Guards, or, on the other hand, 
as the rival of a colonial pioneer.? Not a bit of it! 
The modern English writer — and he would not be 
of necessity a traitor to his cloth — would argue in 
this way: A writer has in England no social position; 
an officer in the Guards is at the top of the tree. 
Therefore the heroine would take the officer in the 
Guards. Or, again, he would say a man of letters is 
regarded as something less than a man, whereas any 
sort of individual returning from the colonies is re- 
garded inevitably as something rather more than two 
supermen rolled into one. So that the heroine would 
inevitably take the returned colonist. 

No, this writer would not be a traitor to his cloth. 
It does not matter that officers in the Guards are 
mostly rather silly fools, without conversation or any 
interests beyond the head of their polo mallets, or 
that nearly every returned colonial can do nothing 
better than talk of the affairs of his dull colony in the 
language at once of a bore and a prig — for of necessity 

269 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

his mind is occupied with a civiHzation of a low kind. 
But still the poor depressed writer will see that the 
heroine — being a bright and beautiful English girl — 
will prefer money or social position to any of the 
delights of communing with giants of the intellect. 
And to marry a lieutenant in the Guards is to have 
duchesses on your visiting list or to go yearly to Ascot 
in the smartest of frocks, though there may be some 
difficulty in meeting the bills sent in by Madame 
Somebody. Or, again, to marry a colonial adminis- 
trator or one of those rather sketchy gentlemen from 
Australia who are always lecturing us as if they were 
so many Roosevelts by the grace of God — to marry 
some such gentleman is in all probability to become 
at least the wife of a K.C.M.G., possibly of a peer, 
to have eventually a palace in Park Lane and the 
country estate of an impoverished earl. 

So the writer of fiction would estimate the chances, 
and I do not know whether he would be risht or 
wrong; for certainly the ordinary man of letters has 
precious little to offer anybody, and none too much for 
himself. Poor devil, he is between the necessity 
for an expenditure that would have seemed vast to 
his grandfather and a buying public that day by day 
shows less desire to buy books. For this too the 
South African War was partly responsible. I had a 
young connection who lately went up for the pre- 
Hminary examination at the Admiralty. Said the 
examining admiral: 

270 



HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

**Now, my man, what papers does your father read ? 
And what do you judge from that that his politics 
are r 

This was not an invidious political question on the 
admiral's part; the object of the examination is to test 
a boy's powers of observation. The boy's answer was: 

"Oh, my governor's a Tory. He reads the Daily 
Chronicle J the Daily News, the Westminster Gazette, 
the Manchester Guardian. . . ." 

"But," said the admiral, aghast, "those are all 
Liberal papers. You said your father was a Tory." 

"Oh yes," the boy answered with assurance, "he 
takes in the Times, the Saturday Review, the Spec- 
tator, and the Field, to give his side a show — to put the 
money into their pockets. But he never reads any 
of them except now and then, and the Field always 
on Sunday. He says he can do all the lying that is 
wanted on his side for himself, without reading the 
Tory papers. But he wants to know what lies the 
other side are telling, because he can't make them 
up for himself." 

The admiral laughed and passed the boy, but the 
admiral was old-fashioned. He had a pre-Boer-War 
habit of mind as regarded the newspapers. In his 
prime he took the Times or the Morning Post, and 
that was all he had in the way of a paper. But with 
the coming of the South African War we acquired 
the habit of skimming through from seven to ten 
papers a day — to get a little hope. I don't blame 

271 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

us. The man who could get through the period of 
Spion Kop without rushing anywhere to read the 
latest bulletin, or could keep in his pocket one single 
penny that might give him some glimmer of hopeful 
news, was something less than a man. I suppose I 
was as hot a pro-Boer as any one well could be, but 
I know I came very near to crying with joy when 
Mafeking was relieved. I remember that that night I 
had been up to Highgate. I was coming back very 
late and I asked the tram-driver if there was any news. 
He said there was none. Suddenly the conductor 
came running out of the fire-station, shouting: 

"The relief-party is in!" 

Immediately he scrambled on board the tram, the 
driver whipped his horses to a gallop, and we went 
tearing madly down that long hill into the darkness, 
the conductor standing on top of the tram and shout- 
ing at the top of his voice that Mafeking was relieved. 
And, in those black and grim streets, shining with 
the wet, suddenly every window lit up and opened, 
and from each there came out a Union Jack. It was 
as if we entered a city given over to night, to the 
tears of the rain, to merciless suspension, and as if we 
left behind us streets gay, triumphant, illuminated, 
imperial. Or perhaps imperial is not the word. I 
don't know. 

Farther down in the town we came upon places 
where the news was already. I went toward St. 
Paul's to see if there was not some sort of inspiring 

272 



HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

demonstration. But in Holborn I was knocked down. 
A fat and elderly gentleman, bearing over his shoulder 
a long pole on which were nailed about twenty little 
flags, turned suddenly round and the end of the pole 
caught me under the ear. 

Imperial .? No, I think not. We were more like 
a nation of convicted murderers, suddenly reprieved 
when the hangman's cap was over our eyes. I think 
I was as glad as any one else. But the Nemesis re- 
mains. Still, every day I read my five newspapers. 
And, in common with the rest of England, I don't 
believe a single word that I read in any one of them. 
Like the father of the boy who was up for examination, 
I prefer to read papers of the shade of politics that for 
the moment may happen to be not my own. I can 
lie so much more skilfully than any journalist upon 
my own side. 

But this enormous and unimpressed reading of 
newspapers has given the last kick to the writer of 
books. It is the end of him. He has gone out. Before 
the war a rich man occasionally bought a book. 
The other day I owned a periodical. Said a man to 
me — he owned seven motor-cars: 

"I wish your paper did not cost half-a-crown. If 
it was only a shilling I would certainly buy it. But 
times are so hard that I have to put down my book 
bill." "And he had great possessions." 

Before the war this gentleman would have been 
forced, by sheer hypocrisy, to pay that particular 

273. 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

cock to iEsculapius. But the war gave us our excuse 
for "putting down" anything — book bills coming, 
of course, first — and since the war my friend has 
had to keep it up against a Rand magnate of his 
immediate circle. At that moment this other gentle- 
man owned six motor-cars. My friend had therefore 
to have his seven. I believe he was the second richest 
man in England. 

I cannot, however, say that the poor come any 
better out of that particular struggle. Thus at about 
the same time I received a whining letter from a 
working-man's club in the north of London. They 
said that they numbered exactly thirty, that my 
periodical was absolutely necessary to them, and 
that they could not possibly afford half-a-crown. 
They were mostly school teachers. I answered per- 
fectly seriously that if my periodical was so abso- 
lutely necessary to the saving of their souls, there 
were exactly thirty of them, so that to purchase a 
copy for their club would cost each of them exactly 
one penny per month. I suggested that if each one 
of them would once a month walk a penny tram-fare, 
or smoke one-sixty-fourth of a pound less tobacco, 
or drink one-quarter of a pint less beer, or go for one 
day without a daily paper, their club might very well 
purchase monthly a copy of my so necessary period- 
ical. I received in reply a note from the secretary 
of that club stating that my letter was ribald, in- 
sulting, and utterly unsympathetic to the woes of 

274 



HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

the poor who had paid me an undeserved compli- 
ment. 

No. I do not think that the workman, the school 
teacher, and the rest of them will be any better masters 
for literature which is falling under their dominance. 
And I do not see any hope of improvement until the 
state supplies literature free. That, of course, is 
coming, but I have no doubt that the state will sweat 
the author even more mercilessly than do, in effect, 
the millionaire, the shopkeeper, the school teacher, 
and the workman of to-day. For all these people 
demand such literature as they have time, or deign, 
to consume — they demand it at derisorily cheap rates. 
And you cannot have good new literature cheaply. 
It cannot be done, simply because the author, too, 
has the right to live. Of course you may have cheap 
reprints of the works of dead authors— as cheaply 
as you like, for the state, with its contempt for all 
things of the mind, steals the only property which is 
really created by any man. So the heirs of Shake- 
speare and of Dickens may go starve, while their non- 
copyright editions contribute to the starvation of 
succeeding authors. 

That authors themselves have contributed to the 
want of interest in literature that the public displays 
is also true. That is a legacy of Pre-Raphaelism — 
the worst legacy that any movement ever left behind 
it. For those young men from whom I fled into the 
country invented later, or had already invented, the 

275 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

dreary shibboleth that literature must be written by 
those who have read the "Cuchullain Saga" or some- 
thing dull and pompous, for those who have read 
similar works. Literature, these people say, is of 
necessity abstruse, esoteric, far-fetched and unread- 
able. Nothing is less true, nothing more fatal. Great 
literature always is and always has been popular. 
It has had, that is to say, its popular appeal. Homer 
was a popular writer, Virgil was a popular writer, 
Chaucer wrote in what was then called the vulgar 
tongue for the common people. This, too, Dante did. 
I believe that Shakespeare deliberately "wrote down" 
in order to catch the ear of the multitude. Goethe 
was one of the most popular authors of his day, and 
the most popular author of to-day or any time was 
also the finest artist of his own or any day. This was 
Guy de Maupassant. 

Who, I wonder, in England will ever realize that 
literature, besides being "elevating," is a gay thing, 
is a pleasant thing, is a thing made for the increase 
of joy, of mirth, of happiness, and of those tears 
which are near to joy .? It is the business of a book 
to be easy to read — to be as easy to read as any book 
upon its given subject possibly can be. I do not mean 
to say that a book about the Treaty of Tilsit can ever 
be as easy for a water-side laborer or for me to read 
as a work about things that I or the water-side laborer 
know perfectly well. But it is the duty of the 
author to capture attention, and then to make 

276 



HEROES AND SOME HEROINES 

his subject plain ; there is no other duty of an 
author. 

It is not for him to pose as a priest dwelHng among 
obscurities. If his readers, if his lovers, will regard 
him as priest it is very well. Or, if his readers, if his 
lovers, will find and seek to cast light upon obscurities 
in his pages it will be still better, for that will mean 
that in them he has awakened thought and emotions. 
And when an author — ^when any artist— has awakened 
in another person thoughts and emotions, he is, to 
the measure of the light vouchsafed him, blessed 
indeed. This author will have told his tale in lan- 
guage as simple as his personality will permit him to 
use, in thoughts as simple as God will give him. 

Here stand I, the man in the street. I have no 
special knowledge, I have no special gifts. I desire 
to be interested as I was interested when I read in 
the coal-cellar the adventures of Harkaway Dick. 
I desire to be interested as I was interested when I 
first read Ivanhoe, Lear, Nicholas Ntckleby, La 
Maison Tellier, Fathers and Children, The Trial of 
Joan of Arc, The Arabian Nights, or — twenty years 
ago — The Dolly Dialogues or Daisy Miller. You see, 
the poor man in the street is catholic enough in his 
tastes. And he has a passionate desire to be inter- 
ested. This is indeed the noblest and the finest of all 
desires, since it means that he desires to enter into 
the fortunes, the hopes, the very hearts of his fellow- 
men, and it is in this way and in no other that litera- 

277 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

ture can render a man better, I once lent a book 
to an old and quite ignorant cottage woman who had 
always had a taste for reading novels. And there are 
few cottage people who will not read novels with 
avidity. Some days afterward I went in to see this old 
woman. The tears were dropping down her cheeks, 
and she was wiping them away as fast as she could. 
She had just finished the book in question. She said: 

**Ah! aw do jest love yon book. It does me all 
the good in the world. Aw feels a score of years 
leeter for the cry!" 

This book was Fathers and Children. Yet what 
was Bazarow to her, or she to Bazarow ^ 

And there the matter is in a nutshell. Here I 
stand and cry for such a writer, and when such a 
writer, with such a purpose, disregarding all shib- 
boleths, considering himself not as a priest who has 
to express ''himself but as quite a humble man 
who has before him the task of interesting me and 
the millions that I represent — when this writer comes 
he will sweep away all barriers. No markets will 
be closed to him, and no doors; there will be no 
hearts that he will not enter and no hearth that will 
not welcome him as its guest. He will be honored 
by emperors, and ploughmen will desire to take his 
hand. Wealth will be his beyond belief, and power. 
And he will be such a priest as Moses was, or those 
who were greater than Moses. But I do not think 
that he will have the " CuchuUain Saga " by heart. 

278 



XIII 

CHANGES 

I WAS walking the other day down one of the 
stretches of main road of the west of London. 
Rather low houses of brownish brick recede a little 
way from the road behind gardens of their own, or 
behind little crescents common to each group of 
houses. Omnibuses pass numerously before them, 
and there is a heavy traffic of motor-vehicles, because 
the road leads out into the country toward the west. 
But since this particular day happened to be a Sun- 
day, the stretch of road, perhaps half a mile in length, 
was rather empty. I could see only two horse 'buses, 
a brougham, and a number of cyclists. And at that 
moment it occurred to me to think that there were 
no changes here at all. There was nothing at that 
moment to tell me that I was not the small boy that 
thirty years ago used, with great regularity, to walk 
along that stretch of road in order to go into Kensing- 
ton Gardens. It was a remarkably odd sensation. 
For the moment I seemed to be back there, I 
seemed to be a child again, rather timid and won- 
deringly setting out upon tremendous adventures 

279 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

that the exploring of London streets then seemed to 
entail. 

And having thus dipped for a moment into a past 
as unattainable as is the age of Homer, I came back 
very sharply before the first of the horse 'buses and 
the fourth small band of cyclists had passed me — 
I came back to wondering about what changes the 
third of a century that I can remember had wrought 
in London and in us. It is sometimes pleasant, it 
is nearly always salutary, thus to take stock. Con- 
sidering myself, it was astonishing how little I seemed 
to myself to have changed since I was a very little 
boy in a velveteen coat with gold buttons and long 
golden ringlets. I venture to obtrude this small 
piece of personality because it is a subject that has 
always interested me — the subject, not so much of 
myself, as in how far the rest of humanity seem to 
themselves to resemble me. I mean that to myself 
I never seemed to have grown up. This circumstance 
strikes me most forcibly when I go into my kitchen. 
I perceive saucepans, kitchen spoons, tin canisters, 
chopping- boards, egg-beaters, and objects whose 
very names I do not even know. I perceive these 
objects, and suddenly it comes into my mind — though 
I can hardly believe it — that these things actually 
belong to me. I can really do what I like with them 
if I want to. I might positively use the largest of 
the saucepans for making butterscotch, or I might 
fill the egg-beater with ink and churn it up. For 

280 



CHANGES 



such were the adventurous aspirations of my child- 
hood when I peeped into the kitchen, which was 
a forbidden and glamourous place inhabited by a 
forbidding moral force known as Cook. And that 
glamour still persists, that feeling still remains. I do 
not really very often go into my kitchen, although 
it, and all it contains, are my property. I do not go 
into it because, lurking at the back of my head, I have 
always the feeling that I am a little boy who will 
be either "spoken to" or spanked by a mysterious 
They. In my childhood They represented a host of 
clearly perceived persons: my parents, my nurse, 
the housemaid, the hardly ever visible cook, a day- 
school master, several awful entities in blue who 
hung about in the streets and diminished seriously 
the enjoyment of life, and a large host of unnamed 
adults who possessed apparently remarkable and 
terrorizing powers. All these people were restraints. 
Nowadays, as far as I know, I have no restraints. 
No one has a right, no one has any authority, to 
restrain me. I can go where I like; I can do what 
I like; I can think, say, eat, drink, touch, break, 
whatever I like that is within the range of my own 
small empire. And yet till the other day I had con- 
stantly at the back of my mind the fear of a mysterious 
They — a feeling that has not changed in the least 
since the day when last I could not possibly resist it, 
and I threw from an upper window a large piece of 
whiting at the helmet of a policeman who was stand- 

281 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

ing in the road below. Yesterday I felt quite a strong 
desire to do the same thing when a bag of flour was 
brought to me for my inspection because it was said to 
be mouldy. There was the traflSc going up and down 
underneath my windows, there was the sunlight, and 
there, his buckles and his buttons shining, there 
positively, on the other side of the road, stalked the 
policeman. But I resisted the temptation. My 
mind travelled rapidly over the possibilities. I won- 
dered whether I could hit the policeman at the dis- 
tance, and presumed I could. I wondered whether 
the policeman would be able to identify the house 
from which the missile came, and presumed he would 
not. I wondered whether the servant could be trusted 
not to peach, and presumed she could. I considered 
what it would cost me, and imagined that, at the 
worst, the price would be something less than that of 
a stall at a theatre, while I desired to throw the bag 
of flour very much more than I have ever desired to 
go to a theatre. And yet, as I have said, I resisted 
the temptation. I was afraid of a mysterious They. 
Or, again, I could remember very distinctly as a 
small boy staring in at the window of a sweet-shop 
near Gower Street Station and perceiving that there 
brandy balls might be had for the price of only four- 
pence a pound. And I remember thinking that 
I had discovered the secret of perpetual happiness. 
With a pound of brandy balls I could be happy from 
one end of the day to the other. I was aware that 

282 



CHANGES 



grown-up people were sometimes unhappy, but no 
grown-up person I ever thought was possessed of 
less than fourpence a day. My doubts as to the 
distant future vanished altogether. I knew that 
whatever happened to others, I was safe. Alas! I 
do not think that I have tasted a brandy ball for 
twenty years. When I have finished my day's work 
I shall send out for a pound of them, though I am 
informed that the price has risen to sixpence. But 
though I cannot imagine that their possession will 
make me happy even for the remaining hours of this 
one day, yet I have not in the least changed, really. 
I know what will make me happy and perfectly 
contented when I get it — symbolically I still desire 
only my little pound of sweets. I have a vague, 
but very strong, feeling that every one else in the 
world around me, if the garments of formality and 
fashion that surround them could only be pierced 
through — that every one else who surrounds me 
equally has not grown up. They have not in essen- 
tials changed since they were small children. And 
the murderer who to-morrow will have the hangman's 
noose round his neck — I am informed at this moment 
that criminals are nowadays always executed on 
Tuesdays at eleven o'clock — so let us say that a 
criminal who will be executed next Tuesday at that 
hour will feel, when the rope is put round his throat, 
an odd, pained feeling that some mistake is being 
made, because you do not really hang a child of six 
19 283 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

in civilized countries. So that perhaps we have not 
any of us changed. Perhaps we are all of us children, 
and the very children that we were when Victoria 
celebrated her first jubilee at about the date when 
Plancus was the consul. And yet we are conscious, 
all of us, that we have tremendously changed since 
the date when Du Maurier gave us the adventures 
of Mr. Cimabue Brown. 

We have changed certainly to the extent that we 
cannot, by any possibility, imagine ourselves putting 
up for two minutes with Mr. Brown at a friend's 
At Home. We could not possibly put up with any 
of these people. They had long, drooping beards; 
they drawled; they come back to one as being ex- 
tremely gentle, and their trousers were enormous. 
Moreover, the women wore bustles and skin-tight 
jerseys. (I have a friend the top cushions of whose 
ottomans are entirely filled with her discarded bustles. 
I cannot imagine what she could have been doing 
with so many of these articles. After all, the fashion 
of wearing them did not last for ten years; and the 
bustle was itself a thing which, not being on view, 
could hardly have needed to change its shape month 
by month. So that, although the friend in question 
already possesses nine Chantecler hats and may, in 
consequence, be said to pay some attention to her 
personal appearance, I cannot imagine what she did 
with this considerable mass of unobstrusive adorn- 
ments.) 

284 



CHANGES 



In those days people seem to have been extra- 
ordinarily slow. It was not only that they dined at 
seven and went about in four-wheelers; it was not 
only that they still asked each other to take pot luck 
(I am just informed that no really modern young 
person any longer understands what this phrase 
means). It is not only that nowadays if we chance 
to have to remain in town in August we do not any 
longer pull down the front blinds, live in our kitchen, 
and acquire by hook or by crook a visitor's guide to 
Homburg, with which we could delude our friends 
and acquaintances on their return from Brighton 
into the idea that in the German spa we had rubbed 
shoulders with the great and noble. It is not only 
that our menus now soar beyond the lofty ideal of 
hot roast beef for Sunday, cold for Monday, hash for 
Tuesday, leg of mutton for Wednesday, cold on 
Thursday, and so on; it is that we seem altogether 
to have changed. It is true that we have not grown 
up, but we are different animals. If we should open 
a file of the Times for 1875 and find that the leader 
writer agreed with some of our sentiments to-day, 
we should be as much astonished as we are when we 
find on Egyptian monuments that the lady who set 
snares for the virtue of Joseph was dissatisfied with 
the state of her linen when it came home from the 
wash. 

Now where exactly do these changes, as the phrase 
is, come in ? Why should one feel such a shock of 

285 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

surprise at discovering that a small slice of High 
Street, Kensington, from the Addison Road railway 
bridge to the Earl's Court Road has not "changed"? 
Change has crept right up to the public-house at 
the corner. Why, only yesterday I noticed that the 
pastry cook's next door to the public-house was *'to 
let." This is a great and historic change. As a 
boy I used to gaze into its windows and perceive a 
model of Windsor Castle in icing-sugar. And that 
castle certainly appeared to me larger and more like 
what a real castle ought to be than did Windsor 
Castle, which I saw for the first time last month. I 
am told that at that now vanished confectioner's you 
could get an excellent plate of ox-tail soup and a cut 
off the joint for lunch. Let me then give it the alms 
for oblivion of this tear. Across the front of another 
confectioner's near here is painted the inscription, 
"Routs catered for." What was a rout .f* I suppose 
it was some sort of party, but what did you do when 
you got there .? I remember reading a description 
by Albert Smith of a conversazione at somebody's 
private house, and a conversazione in those days 
was the most modern form of entertainment. Appar- 
ently it consisted in taking a lady's arm and wander- 
ing round among showcases. The host and hostess 
had borrowed wax models of anatomical dissections 
of a most realistic kind from the nearest hospital, and 
this formed the amusement provided for the guests, 
weak negus and seed biscuits being the only refresh- 

286 



CHANGES 



ment. This entertainment was spoken of in terms of 
reprobation by Mr. Albert Smith — in the same terms 
as we might imagine would be adopted by a popular 
moralist in talking of the doings of the smart set 
to-day. Mr. Smith considered that it constituted a 
lamentably wild form of dissipation and one which no 
lady who was really a lady ought to desire to attend. 

Yes, very decidedly, we have changed all that. 
Though we have not grown up, though we are still 
children, we want something more exciting than 
anatomical dissections in glass cases when we are 
asked out of an evening. We have grown harder, 
we have grown more rapid in our movements, we 
have grown more avid of sensation, we have grown 
more contemptuous of public opinion, we have become 
the last word. 

But if we are more avid of sensations, if we are 
restless more to witness or to possess, to go through 
or to throw away always a greater and greater number 
of feelings or events or objects, we are, I should say, 
less careful in our selections. The word *' exquisite" 
has gone almost as completely out of our vocabulary 
as the words "pot luck." And for the same reason. 
We are no longer expected to take pot luck, because 
our hostess, by means of the telephone, can always 
get from round the corner some sort of ready-made 
confection that has only to be stood for ten minutes 
in a hain-marie to form a course of an indifferent 
dinner. She would do that if she were mildly old- 

287 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

fashioned. If she were at all up to date she would 
just say, "Oh, don't bother to come all this way out. 
Let's meet at the Dash and dine there." In either 
case pot luck has gone, as has "dropping in of an 
evening." Social events in all classes are now so 
frequent; a pleasant, leisurely impromptu fore- 
gathering is so seldom practicable that we seldom 
essay it. 

Dining in restaurants is in many ways gay, pleasant, 
and desirable. It renders us on the one hand more 
polite, it renders us on the other less sincere, less 
intimate with our friends, and less exacting. We have 
to be tidier and more urbane, but on the other hand 
we cannot so tyrannically exact of the cook that the 
dishes shall be impeccable. We are democratized. 
If in a restaurant we make a horrible noise because 
the fish is not absolutely all that it should be, we 
shall have it borne in upon us that we are only two or 
three out of several hundred customers, that we may 
go elsewhere, and that we shall not get anything 
better anywhere else. If the tipping system were 
abolished it would be impossible to get a decent meal 
anywhere in London. 

At present it is difficult. It is difficult, that is to 
say, to get a good meal anywhere with certainty. 
You may patronize a place for a month and live well, 
or very well. Then suddenly something goes wrong, 
everything goes wrong, a whole menu is uneatable. 
The cook may have gone; the management, set on 

288 



CHANGES 



economizing, will have substituted margarine for 
real butter in cooking; the business may have become 
a limited company with nothing left to it but the old 
name and redecorated premises. And five hundred 
customers will not know any difference. Provided 
that a book has a binding with a sufficiency of gilt; 
provided that a dinner has its menu; provided that 
a picture has its frame, a book's a book, a dinner's 
a dinner, a picture will cover so much wall-space, and, 
being cheapened, will find buyers enough. 

And this tendency pervades every class of estab- 
lishment; it is not only that French cookery is every- 
where very risky to set out upon. Always repulsive 
in appearance and hopelessly indigestible, English 
plain cooking is dead. At my birth I was put up 
for election at an old club that has now disappeared. 
My name came up for election when I was eighteen, 
and I was allowed, with proper restrictions — when, 
as it were, I was accompanied by a nurse — I was 
allowed the use of the premises. The members were 
almost all Anglo-Indians of considerable age, and 
many were of a fine stinginess. They used to find the 
club prices for meals unthinkable, and it was their 
habit, about lunch-time or toward seven, to toddle 
off to an eating-house in the immediate neighborhood. 
Here, for the sum of eightpence, they would obtain 
a plate of meat and a piece of bread. There were no 
table-cloths on the tables, that were covered with black 
leather wiped clean with a wet cloth; table-napkins 

289 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

cost a penny, and the floors were sanded. But the 
food was splendid of its kind, and the company con- 
sisted entirely of venerable clubmen. There was a 
special brew of ale, the best in the world; the cheese 
was always the finest October, and a really wonderful 
port was to be had. My venerable fellow-members, 
however, as a rule limited themselves to their plate 
of meat, after which they would walk back to the club. 
Here they could have bread and cheese and a glass 
of ale for nothing. (I wonder if there is still in London 
any club like this ^ I know there is one yet where 
your change is washed and wrapped in tissue-paper.) 
But there was the club and there was the Dash eating- 
house. 

The other day I was anxious to prove to a stranger 
that London was the cheapest city in the world, and 
casting about in my mind for a means of proof I 
remembered the Dash. It was still there. The low 
rooms were the same; the leather-covered tables 
were the same. The menus were the same; but dis- 
may came upon me when I observed that every item 
on the menu was a penny cheaper. And napkins were 
handed to us gratis! 

And then the meat. Oh dear! And the old special 
ale was no more to be had; the place was tied to a 
London brewery. And the cheese was Canadian! 
The place, you see, had been discovered by the city 
clerk. There was not one old face, not one bald head 
there. The new management had taken in many 

290 



CHANGES 



more rooms. I do not know if anywhere there was 
written Ichabod on the walls, and no old waiter sadly 
deplored the changes, for we were waited upon by 
girls. The food was tepid and tough, but as I paid 
my ridiculously tiny bill the voice of a clerk behind 
me remarked, "Quite the good old times." So that 
there we are. 

If I try to illustrate my meaning in terms of eating 
rather than by illustrations less material it is not 
that exactly similar processes are not observable 
everywhere else. We grow more rapid, but our 
senses are coarsened; we grow more polite, we grow 
even more tolerant, but we seek less earnestly after 
the truth. In the seventies and eighties men were 
intolerably slow, but they had enthusiasms. A writer 
thought more about writing, a painter thought more 
about painting, a preacher, for the matter of that, 
more about preaching. A quixotic act to-day is 
regarded as something almost criminal if it entails 
loss of money. It is not so long since the word quixotic 
meant foolish but fine, whereas nowadays, so seldom 
does any action really quixotic occur, that it is almost 
invariably regarded with suspicion, and the person 
indulging himself in such an action is apt to find 
himself avoided. His friends may think that he is 
"going to get something out of it" that they cannot 
see, and they dread lest that something be got out of 
themselves. Probably we have not gained much, 
probably we have not lost much. Probably the thinker 

291 



V 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

has a worse time of it; the unthinking certainly have 
an immensely better one. The squalor and the filth 
of the existence of the poor in the seventies and eighties 
are almost unthinkable to-day. I am physically and 
mentally in the most wretched state when I happen 
to travel by one of the London "tubes." The noise is 
barbaric, the smell of humanity sickening, and the 
sight of the comparatively imbecile faces of my fellow- 
townsmen of the middle and lower classes is sometimes 
more depressing than I can stand. For what can 
be more depressing than to sit with forty or fifty 
of one's fellow-beings in a strong light, all of them 
barbarously and unbecomingly clad and each of them 
with a face dull, heavy, unvivacious, to all appear- 
ances incapable of a ray of human intelligence, of a 
scintilla of original thought ? So, at least, I imagine 
the late Mr. Herbert Spencer thinking if his ghost 
could come once more from the shades of the billiard- 
room of the Athenaeum Club and, paying his two- 
pence, descend into the lift and take the tube from 
Shepherd's Bush to Tottenham Cour«- Road. (This, 
by - the - bye, would pretty exactly have represented 
Mr, Spencer's attitude. That gentleman once sat 
at table next to a connection of my own for three 
consecutive days. He sat in deep silence. Upon 
the fourth day he took from his ears two little pads 
of cotton -wool. He exhibited them to the lady 
and remarking, "I stop my ears with these when 
I perceive there is no one at the table likely to 

292 



CHANGES 



afford rational conversation," he put them back 
again.) 

But if the thinker, if the man with a taste for the 
exquisite, have to-day a pretty bad time of it unless 
he stops at home, all we humbler people get through 
our little lives and accomplish our ultimate end in 
becoming the stuif that fills graveyards, upon the 
whole much more agreeably. If exquisite editions 
of books are not at our hand, we get them plentifully 
in editions of an extreme cheapness. If we desire 
to see pictures, it will no longer be an expedition of a 
day to go from Hammersmith, which is now called 
West Kensington Park, to the National Gallery. 

I can remember very well the time when it meant 
a tenpenny 'bus fare and an hour's slow drive to go 
from Hammersmith to Trafalgar Square, and it 
cost as much and took as long to go from Shepherd's 
Bush to Oxford Circus. And these sums and these 
spaces of time, when they come to be doubled, require 
to be seriously thought about. Nowadays we do not 
think at all. Life is much fuller, and I fancy we value 
a visit to the National Gallery much less. But if we 
value it less, still it is more agreeable. I remember 
travelling in an odious horse-box of grimy yellow wood 
in an intolerable stench of sulphur and shag tobacco 
along with eleven navvies in the horrid old under- 
ground trains. The conditions were unspeakable, 
the fares relatively high. This occurred to me perhaps 
once or twice, but they must have been the daily con- 

293 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

ditions of how very large a class! Nowadays our 
friend the workman steps into a clean lift and descends 
into cool, white, brilliantly lit tunnels that twenty-five 
years ago would have been things entirely beyond his 
experience or his dreams. And because of them, too, 
he can live farther out, in a cleaner air, in conditions 
immeasurably superior. Routs are no longer catered 
for, leisure is an unknown thing, and the old-fashioned 
confectioner's shop will be pulled down to make way 
for a cheap-jack of some sort, inhabiting a terra-cotta 
palace with great plate-glass windows and white, 
soft-stone facings. There will be about the new man 
something meretricious, flashy, and not altogether 
desirable. I do not know that I shall ever want to 
go into such a shop, but to many people the little 
pictures on tickets that are given away with his little 
packets of cigarettes — to a great many hundreds of 
simple and kindly people, the arms of the city of Bath 
or the portrait of the infant son of the King of Spain 
will afford great and harmless joy and excitement. 
I do not mean to say that in the pockets of this great 
alluvial world of humanity the old order will not re- 
main in an even astonishing degree. 

I was talking the other day to a woman of position 
when she told me that her daughters were immeasur- 
ably freer than she had been at their age. I asked 
her if she would let her daughters walk about alone 
in the streets. "Oh, dear, yes," she said. I asked 
her whether she would allow one of them to walk 

294 



CHANGES 



down Bond Street alone. "Oh, dear, certainly not 
Bond Street!" she said. I tried to get at what was 
the matter with Bond Street. I have walked down it 
myself innumerable times without noticing anything to 
distinguish it from any other street. But she said no, 
the girl might walk about Sloane Street or that sort 
of place, but certainly not Bond Street. I should 
have thought myself, from observation, that Sloane 
Street was rather the haunt of evil characters, but I let 
the matter drop when my friend observed that, of 
course, a man of my intelligence must be only laughing 
when I pretended that I could not see the distinction. 
I pursued therefore further geographical investiga- 
tions. I asked her if she would permit her daughter 
to walk along the Strand. She said: "Good gracious 
me! The Strand! Why, I don't suppose the child 
knows where it is!" I said, "But the Strand!" "My 
dear man," she answered, "what should she want to 
walk along the Strand for .? What could possibly 
take her to the Strand .?" I suggested timidly, theatres. 
" But you only go to them in a brougham, muffled up 
to the eyes. She wouldn't see which way she was 
going." And she called to her daughter, who was on 
the other side of the room: "My dear, do you know 
where the Strand is l" And in clear, well-drilled tones 
she got her answer, "No, mamma," as if a private 
were answering an officer. The young lady was cer- 
tainly twenty-five. So that perhaps the old order does 
not so much change. Reflecting upon the subject of 

295 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

Bond Street, it occurred to me that it would not be 
so much a question of the maiden's running the risk 
of encountering evil characters as that, since every one 
walks down Bond Street, every one would see her 
walking there alone. You have got to make the con- 
cession to modern opinion, you have got to let your 
daughter go out without an attendant maid, but you 
do not want to let anybody know that you have done it. 
And that, after all, is the fine old British spirit gallantly 
manifesting itself in an unfriendly day. No doubt, 
in spite of the constant planing that we are under- 
going, in spite of the constant attrition that constantly 
ensues when man rubs against man all day long in 
perpetual short flights, each flight the flight of a 
battalion; in spite of the perpetual noises by which 
we are deafened, in spite of the perpetual materialism 
to which we are forced in order to find the means for 
all this restlessness — in spite of it all the "character" 
still flourishes among us. Perhaps we are each and 
every one of us characters, each and every one of us 
outwardly cut to pattern but inwardly as eccentric 
as an old gentleman friend of mine who will not go 
to bed without putting his boots upon the mantel- 
piece! In one thing I think we have changed. I 
had a very elderly and esteemed relative who once 
told me that while walking along the Strand he met a 
lion that had escaped from Exeter Change. I said, 
"What did you do.?" and he looked at me with con- 
tempt as if the question were imbecile. "Dof" he 

296 



CHANGES 



said. "Why, I took a cab." I imagine that still 
in most of the emergencies of this life we fly to that 
refuge. But I believe that the poor Strand has changed 
in another respect. I was once walking along the 
south side — the side on which now stand the Cecil 
and Strand hotels — when my grandfather, happening 
to drive past in a hansom, sprang suddenly out and, 
addressing me with many expletives and a look of 
alarm, wanted to know what the devil I was doing 
on that side. I really did not know why I should not 
be there or how it differed from the north side, but he 
concluded by saying that if he ever saw me there 
again he would kick me straightway out of his house. 
So that I suppose in the days of Beau Brummel there 
must have been unsavory characters in that now 
rigid thoroughfare. But I doubt whether to-day we 
have so much sense of locality left. One street is 
becoming so much like another, and Booksellers' 
Row is gone. I fancy that these actual changes in 
the aspect of the city must make a difference in our 
psychologies. You cannot be quite the same man 
if daily you joggle past St. Mary Abbot's Terrace upon 
the top of a horse 'bus; you cannot be the same man 
if you shoot past the terra-cotta, plate-glass erections 
that have replaced those gracious old houses with the 
triangle of unoccupied space in front of them — if you 
shoot, rattle, and bang past them. Your thoughts 
must be different, and with each successive blow upon 
the observation your brain must change a little and a 

297 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

little more. And the change is all away from the 
direction of leisure, of spacious thought, of ease. 
Each acceleration of a means of access makes you 
more able to get through more work in a given time, 
but each such acceleration gives each of your rivals 
exactly the same chance. With each, competition 
grows sterner and sterner, w4th each the mere struggle 
for existence becomes more and more fierce. And we 
leave things nowadays so irrevocably behind us. It 
is a quaint thought, but a perfectly sound one, to say 
that we are nearer to habits of barbarism, that we 
could more easily revert to days of savagery than we 
could pick up again the tone of thought, of mind and 
habit, of the men of thirty years ago. The terra-cotta 
and plate-glass will inevitably in the course of ages 
be replaced by swamps, marsh, and tidal river-beds. 
That will return, but the old houses of St. Mary 
Abbot's Terrace will never come back. And as these 
things change, so, oddly, do our appreciations veer 
round. It was the custom of the eighties to talk of 
houses like those of Harley Street as ugly, square, 
brick boxes, as the most contemptible things in the 
world, as the last word of the art and the architecture 
of a miserable bourgeoisie. They seemed then per- 
manent, hideous, unassailable. But already we regard 
them with a certain tenderness, and consider that 
they may soon be gone. We think them quaint, 
Georgian and lovable, and it is with a certain regret 
that we realize that before very long they, too, will be 

298 



CHANGES 



swept away and another characteristic piece of Lon- 
don will be gone forever. We are unifying and unify- 
ing and unifying. We are standardizing ourselves 
and we are doing away with everything that is out- 
standing. And that, I think, is the moral to it all, 
the moral of our day and of our age. We are making 
a great many little people more cheerful and more 
bearable in their material circumstances. We are 
knocking for the select few the flavor of the finer things 
out of life. In the atmosphere of to-day the finer 
things cannot flourish. There is no air for them; 
there is no time for them. We are not rich enough; 
we do not care for anything, and we never can come 
to care for anything that we do not like at first. And 
the finer the flavor the longer we take to get used to it. 
So that that is going, and many, many, many little 
pleasures are coming. Whether you like it or whether 
you do not depends solely upon yourself. There is 
no man living who can say for us all whether it is 
good or evil. An old shoeblack said to me the other 
day: "These are bad times we live in, sir. Now there 
ain't so many horse 'buses, there ain't so much mud in 
the streets, and it's bitter hard to get a living." 

20 



XIV 

AND AGAIN CHANGES 

WHEN we look back upon the lives of our fathers 
the first thing that seems to strike us is their 
intolerable slowness, and then the gloom in which they 
lived — or perhaps the gloom would strike us first. 
Theirs seemed to be a land where it was always after- 
noon, with large gas-lamps flaring in white ground- 
glass globes, wasting an extraordinary amount of light. 
So that when I read in a novel of Miss Thackeray's 
that the lovers stepped out into the sunlit park, and 
the gay breezes fluttered their voluminous trousers 
or their flounced crinolines, I simply do not believe it. 
1 do not believe they had sunlight, though they prob- 
ably had a park, and indeed in those days there were 
more elms in Kensington Gardens than to-day the 
Gardens can show. They certainly must have had 
trousers then, and as for crinolines, will not your old 
family cook, if you coax her, produce from a cupboard 
somewhere near the ceiling of the kitchen a structure 
like a bird-cage connected by strips of what looks 
like very dirty linen ? This, she will assure you with 
an almost reverential tone of voice, was the last crino- 

300 



AND AGAIN CHANGES 

line she ever wore — and she says that she hears they 
are coming in again. They are always, of course, 
coming in again, though for the moment skirts are 
so tight that, helping a lady to get into a cab yesterday, 
I was almost tempted to pick her up and drop her in. 
I thought she would never have managed it. But 
no doubt, by the time that I am correcting the proofs 
of what I have just written "they" will be "coming in" 
again. My own grandmother used to say that she was 
the only woman in London who never wore a crinoline. 
That, of course, was Pre-Raphaelism, but I feel cer- 
tain that she did wear some sort of whalebone stiffening 
round the bottom or her skirt, if she did not have a 
hoop half-way up. 

Yes, they certainly had crinolines, but I do not 
believe they had any fresh breezes to blow them 
about. They could not have had. It was always 
brown, motionless fog in those days, and our mothers 
and grandmothers sat sewing with their eyes very 
close to the candles. I do not believe that they ever 
went out. What did they have to go out in ? There 
were, it is true, four-wheelers with clean straw in the 
bottom; but there was the danger that if you went 
out in a four-wheeler a straw would stick in the bottom 
flounce of your crinoline and would show that you 
had come in a hired conveyance when you stepped out 
into the comparative brightness of your rout or con- 
versazione. Of course if you were of the mistily ex- 
travagant class that kept its own carriage, you might 

301 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

drive somewhere, but I do not believe that John 
would take the horses out in the evening — John being 
either your tyrannous coachman or your somnolent 
husband, who was in the habit of reading his Times 
after a heavy dinner consisting of soup, fish, an enor- 
mous joint, and probably a milk pudding which you 
took at seven. You had a great deal of heavy mahog- 
any furniture, so that it took the footman an appre- 
ciable time to get the chairs from the dining-room wall 
and arrange them round the solid mahogany table. 
But time did not matter in those days; you had all 
the time in the world on your hands. Why, the table- 
cloth was even whisked off the table after dinner, 
over the heads of the diners, before the wine circulated. 
I know at least in some families that was done, and 
I dare say that even nowadays you could find some 
families still doing it. In those days, too, when a 
telegram came the lady of the house prepared to faint 
— the lady's maid rushed for the smelling-salts, and 
a sort of awful hush pervaded the house from the 
basement to the garrets, where in incredible discom- 
fort the servants slept. And perhaps some of this 
feeling as to the ominousness of telegrams is returning. 
Nowadays, with the telephone everpvhere, it is a com- 
paratively rare thing to receive one of the yellow 
envelopes — except when you happen to be away at 
the seaside and your man goes off with your silver- 
gilt shaving set. I think I have only received one 
telegram this year, and that from a gentleman living 

302 



AND AGAIN CHANGES 

in Richmond, to which distant place modernity has 
not yet spread. And this slowness of pace caused, as 
I have elsewhere pointed out, all the conditions of life 
to be very different. In those days intimacies be- 
tween man and man and woman and woman were 
comparatively frequent, because there was more 
home life. You would be accustomed to have some 
one living round the corner who came in every evening 
and smoked a cigar with you, or if you were a woman 
it would be a "lady friend" who brought her sewing. 
Nowadays I fancy that no one above the station of a 
housemaid or a greengrocer's assistant would have 
a "lady friend" at all, or would at least use those 
words to describe her. We are all men and women 
nowadays, and we have not got any friends. 

A quarter of a century ago, say, there were prac- 
tically no restaurants, though there were chop-houses 
for men; there was not a place where a woman could 
get a cup of tea in all London town. This I fancy 
led to a great deal of drinking among ladies. The 
respectable married woman went shopping; she felt 
tired, she entered a "confectioner's" and had a bath 
bun and a glass of sherry. So it began, and so it 
went on from sherry through cherry brandy to the 
consumption of strong drinks at home in secret. And, 
again, in those days there was an iniquitous institu- 
tion peculiar to the male sex called a club. The erring 
husband returned home at night. Hanging up his 
umbrella on a gas-bracket, his boots upon the hat- 

303 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

rack, and, climbing upstairs in his stockinged feet to 
deposit his top hat on the ground outside his bedroom 
door, would be met by an irate female in a yellow 
peignoir^ carrying a flat candlestick with a candle 
dripping wax. To her he would explain that he had 
been spending his evening at the club, when really 
he had been at the Alhambra, which in those days 
was a very wicked place. I fancy that London middle 
and upper class society in those days was a rather 
scandalous and horrid affair. Certainly the term 
middle-class as an epithet of reproach had its origin 
about then. London was full of a lot of fat and overfed 
men with not too much to do and with time hanging 
heavily on their hands. Their social gifts were entirely 
undeveloped. They had no conversational powers 
and very little to talk about, and the sexes were very 
much shut off one from another. 

Flirtations in those days were almost impossible, or 
they became secret affairs with all the attributes of 
guilt. Nowadays when you can meet anybody, any- 
where, when there are tea-shops, picture galleries, 
men's clubs, ladies' clubs, cock-and-hen clubs, res- 
taurants, and the rest-rooms of the large shops, flirta- 
tions take place comparatively in public and you do 
not have to bolt to Boulogne in order to have a ten 
minutes' tete-a-tete, which is all you might require to 
bore you with a member of the opposite sex. But in 
the seventies and eighties there was nothing else in 
the world to do, just as in centuries before there had 

304 



AND AGAIN CHANGES 

been nothing else to do. We are supposed to be more 
frivolous and I dare say we are, but I should say 
that on the whole we are healthier and less vicious. 
We are, that is to say, more natural. We can get a 
great deal more of what we want without kicking our 
shoes over windmills, and we do not want so much 
more than we can get. For the matter of that, it is 
easy to get much farther than we ever want to. 

There used to be a time when it was the height of 
dissipation to dine on the terrace of the Star and 
Garter at Richmond. One of Ouida's heroines, who 
was, I believe, no better than she should be, is at least 
represented as sitting on that terrace and throwing 
oranges to the swans in the Thames. And since the 
Thames is perhaps three-quarters of a mile distant 
from the Star and Garter, we must consider the lady 
to have been as muscular as she was dangerous and 
dashing. Alas! yesterday I was at Richmond. It 
took me about as long to get there as to get to Brighton, 
and there was the Star and Garter closed. Enormous, 
abhorrent, and dismal, it was like a stucco castle of 
vast dimensions from which no hero would ever again 
rescue a heroine. 

It was very sad, the moon shone down, the river 
was misty in the distance. I should like to have sat 
upon the terrace amid the buzzing of voices, the 
popping of champagne corks. I should like even to 
have seen the guardsmen with the Macassar oil 
dripping from their enormous mustaches — I should 

305 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

have liked even to throw oranges to the sw^ans in the 
river, though I did not know what the swans would 
have done with them. But alas! all these things are 
ghosts, and the world of Ouida is vanished as far 
away as the lost islands of Atlantis. 

If nowadays we want to dine rustically, we run 
thirty miles out of town, though it does not happen 
very often that we have an evening disengaged, so 
that we move about, not very hurried, but quite 
hurried enough in all conscience, from one electri- 
cally lit place to another. We get through three or 
four things at night; we manage a dinner, a theatre, 
an after-theatre supper, and possibly the fag-end of 
a dance after that — and we turn up to breakfast 
at nine next morning, just as serenely as our fathers 
did. I fancy that we even turn up more fresh at 
the breakfast-table, for we are a great deal more 
abstemious in the matter of alcoholic liquors. What 
the preacher entirely failed in, the all-tyrannous 
doctor has triumphantly achieved. The other day 
a lady, talking about the book of a woman novelist, 
remarked to me: 

"I do not know how Miss gets to know things. 

How does she know so exactly the feeling of craving 
for drink that she describes ? I have never seen a 
drunken man in my life." 

This last sentence seemed to me incredible, but 
when I come to think of it, I have not myself seen 
a drunken man for a very long time. Indeed, I think 

306 



AND AGAIN CHANGES 

that the last intoxicated individual that I have seen 
was in a political club of the shade that most strongly 
advocates restrictions upon public- houses. But I 
may digress for a moment to report a couple of sen- 
tences that I heard at an exhibition the other night. 
They seemed to me to be so singular that I have felt 
inclined to build up a whole novel upon them. A 
woman was sitting by herself behind the band-stand, 
in an atmosphere of shade and aloofness, and a man 
came up to her and said, "Your husband is very 
drunk now. We can go off." But, upon the whole, 
the doctor triumphs. You hardly ever see a drunken 
man in the western streets of London; you practically 
never see a drunken woman. And the bars of music 
halls, which not so very many years ago were places 
for alcoholic orgies, are now almost deserted, except 
in the interval when the band plays a selection. In 
the case of music halls, this is partly due perhaps to 
the fact that nowadays you can take a woman to them; 
you can even take a clergyman to them. And the 
other day I saw a Roman Catholic priest watching 
Russian dancers. And of course, if you take a woman, 
a clergyman, or a priest to a music hall, you do not 
desert your seat to sit in the bar. But for the better 
class music halls it is none the less mainly the doctor 
who has done the damage. The Church has told us 
for a century or so that drunkenness was a sin, and 
we went on sinning. Our wives and mothers have 
told us for many years that to be drunk was to make 

307 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

a beast of one's self, and we went on getting by so much 
farther from the angels. But the doctor has gone 
abroad in the land and pronounced sternly that alco- 
hol is bad for the liver, and now we drink barley 
water at our clubs. And what the doctor has done 
for the audiences of the dearer music halls, the cheaper 
music halls have done for their own audiences. You 
will see about eleven o'clock an immense crowd stream- 
ing along the pavements from any suburban Palace 
or Empire — all these people will be quite sober. 
Twenty-five years ago more than half of them would 
have been spending their time and much more money 
in the public-houses. And this is a very pleasant 
thought, which gives me satisfaction every time it 
comes into my head, for 1 like to see people happy 
in this land where happiness is counted as sin — I 
like to see people happy and yet not demonstrably 
damaging their pockets, their healths, or their morals. 
So that what with one thino; and another — what with 
the ease of getting about and the multiplicity of means 
of communication — we see a great deal more of the 
ways of the world. We may be becoming more 
shallow, but we are certainly less hypocritical. We 
may possibly be becoming more timid, but we cer- 
tainly grow much more polite. London is lighter and 
London is more airy. It is so, demonstrably at any 
rate, in its wealthier regions and in its main thorough- 
fares. I do not mean to say that you will not find 
what you might call pockets of late Victorian gloom 

308 



AND AGAIN CHANGES 

and squalor in the north and in the northwest of 
London. There is no knowing what you will not find 
in London, and certainly there are survivals of horrors 
as there are survivals of the picturesque. One lives 
on one's own little modern ring, one has fairly good 
times, one has the perpetual arousing and distracting 
of one's interest. But two years ago I was coming 
back on Saturday night from a small town of a manu- 
facturing type, not very far outside the London radius. 
The little town in itself was one of the ugliest places 
that it was possible to imagine. There was not a 
building in it of any approach to dignity. In every 
one of the windows of the squalid cottages that made 
it up there was a pair of Nottingham curtains; the 
inhabitants were utterly uncivil if you asked them 
the way, and they appeared to be all operative manu- 
facturers, drawing small wages from a slowly decaying 
trade. It was as ugly, as dirty, as dusty, and as mod- 
ern a town as you could find even in the Eastern States 
of America. The railway station was badly illu- 
minated, and in the dim shadows of the platform great 
crowds of the Saturday night inhabitants were wait- 
ing for the last train to the next small town on the line. 
It was a most disagreeable scene. Underfed and 
stunted men sang the coarsest popular songs of the 
year before last of London; underfed and stunted 
boys shouted obscene remarks in hoarse voices. The 
elder women were all dressed in badly fitting garments, 
imitating, I should imagine, the clothes that Queen 

309 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

Victoria wore. The young girls, on the other hand, 
as long as you could not perceive them closely in 
the gloom, wore a most distinguished summer finery, 
but all their things were put on very badly; the 
frilled hats raked over on one side; the shoulders 
were one higher than the other. Petticoats showed 
beneath the bottoms of skirts; the flesh of faces was 
unhealthy and lacking in complexion; the teeth were 
mostly very bad, and the voices usually harsh, cackling, 
and disagreeable, the words being uttered with that 
peculiar intonation which has spread from West 
Essex all over the country, and which is called the 
cockney dialect. It was, in short, a sort of American 
effect. One might have been on a Saturday evening 
at the steam-car depot of the cotton manufacturing 
town called Falls River, N. J. 

And this crowd of unpresentable people, uttering 
disagreeable sounds, packed itself into an ill-lit train; 
and we rumbled through an ugly night, emitting 
from each compartment trails of nasty sounds. We 
screeched popular songs, called out foul epithets, 
occasionally we punched each other's heads; we 
swayed from side to side of the compartments, in solid, 
struggling masses. And this type of life seemed to 
continue all the way from the heart of Bedfordshire 
to about the middle of the northwest of London. 
Changing at the terminus, we took an entirely un- 
familiar London local line whose termination was, I 
think. Hammersmith. And there, as it were, in a long 

310 



AND AGAIN CHANGES 

trail from the northwest to the extreme west of Lon- 
don, was the same atmosphere of gloom, of yellow 
light, of disagreeable humanity, and really hateful 
sounds. So that, in our clean, white, spick-and-span 
London, with its orderly and well-behaved pleasant 
crowds, there remains this — corners into which, as 
it were, the housemaid's broom has swept the dust 
and detritus of a dead age. It was like, that journey, 
going back a quarter of a century. We were Vic- 
torians once again, Victorians in our ugliness, in our 
coarseness, in our objectionable employment of the 
Saturday night, in our drunkenness, and in our sham 
respectability. For among the crowd at the London 
terminus I perceived a gentleman — a workingman of 
the most awe-inspiring respectability, who occasion- 
ally cleans my windows and reproves my frivolity 
with quotations from Ruskin, as if I were a worm 
and he a Calvanistic Savonarola. This gentleman the 
day before had come to me with a piteous tale. He 
had founded a lecture hall in Lambeth, where he was 
accustomed to read extracts from William Morris's 
socialistic pamphlets, from the works of Henry 
George, Joseph McCabe, Upton Sinclair, Ruskin and 
Carlyle, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Wells, Mr. J. K. 
Jerome, and other social reformers. He had founded 
this lecture hall, where, every Sunday morning, he was 
accustomed to act the part of preacher. On the 
Friday night he had come to me with the lamentable 
story that the landlord had seized the furniture, had 

311 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

seized his library, and had closed the hall. My func- 
tion was to head his subscription list, and I suppose 
I headed it. I had always been taught to consider 

Mr. the most respectable of men, though he 

cleans my windows shockingly badly. But then the 
poor fellow had been out of work for nearly eleven 
years, employers disliking his free thinking and 
radical outspokenness. 

And then on that Saturday night I perceived Mr. 
upon the platform of the terminus. He had a pea- 
cock's feather in his billycock hat, he was dancing to 
the tune of "God Save the People!" in a ring that the 
railway police vainly endeavored to move on — and 
there was not a trace of priggishness about his face. 
He was in his shirt-sleeves and snapping his Hngers 
over his head. I doubt for the moment if he could 
have quoted Ruskin, but he shouted, "Down with the 
landlords!" just before the police reached him and 
hustled him off into a cloak-room. 

Filled with curiosity, I went next morning to his 

lecture hall. It was open, and Mr. himself was 

arranging pamphlets for sale upon the trestles. He 
was very forbidding, in a decent suit of black broad- 
cloth with a turn-down collar, a prominent Adam's 
apple and a red satin tie. 

He said that the landlord had consented to let 
him open the hall again, though he still wanted thirty- 
two shillings for the rent and had taken Mr. 's 

typewriter in pawn until that sum should be paid. 

312 



AND AGAIN CHANGES 

Mr. once more quoted Carlyle and Henry George. 

He proved that landlords were unmitigated villains 
and that I — it vs^as in his tone of haughty seriousness 
and earnest moral effort — that I was a frivolous puppy. 
Upon investigation I discovered that I had paid the 
whole quarter's rent of the hall. Mr. had mis- 
represented the figure to me, a fact which he had 
forgotten upon the Sunday morning. Other friends 
had found still more money, which I presume had 

assisted to put Mr. in spirits on the night before. 

I did not mention these things to Mr. , who con- 
tinued to overwhelm me with moral sneers as to the 
uselessness of my life. He, a poor workingman, had 
worked his way so high, whereas I, with all the ad- 
vantages of education and what he was pleased to 
declare was lavish wealth, had achieved no more than 
a few frivolous books. x'\nd mind you, so fully did 
Mr. believe in himself that I retired apologeti- 
cally as his audience began to file in. I was filled with 
a sense of my own unworthiness. 

I should say that Mr. is just another Victorian 

survival; I remember so many of these figures in my 
extreme youth. There was W., a socialist cabinet- 
maker, with flashing eyes, who founded a free-labor 
association for the supply of blacklegs to firms whose 
employees had gone on strike. W., I remember, 
frightened me out of my young life, he was so vocifer- 
ous, and his eyes flashed so. He was generally in 
my grandfather's kitchen eating excellent meals, and 

313 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

persuading my grandfather that he was wanted by the 
poHce for political reasons — a romantic He which very 
much appealed to Madox Brown's simplicity. Then 
there was also a Mr. B., a usually intoxicated paper- 
hanger; he had, I think, no political aspirations, but 
he was largely supported by my family, because of 
his flow of Shakespearian quotations. These never 
stopped, and they were as romantic in those days as 
it was to be in hiding for political reasons. They 
never stopped. I remember once when Mr. B. was 
standing on the top of a ladder, putting up a picture- 
rail and more than reasonably intoxicated, the ladder 
gave way beneath him. He grasped the picture-rail 
by one hand, and hanging there recited the whole of 
the balcony scene from " Romeo and Juliet," waving 
his other arm toward the ceiling and feeling for the top 
ot the ladder with his stockinged feet, his slippers 
having fallen off. He was a nasty, dirty little man, 
but he too impressed me with the sense of my un- 
worthiness. So they all did. I remember at the time 
of the great dock strike being taken to dinner by a 
Manchester labor leader who was anxious to improve 
my morals. There were present Prince Krapotkin, 
Mr. Ben Tillett, Mr. Tom Mann, and I think Mr. John 
Burns. The dinner took place at the Holborn res- 
taurant, and the waiters were frightened out of their 
lives amid the marble, the gilding, and the strains 
of the band. For such a group in those days was 
considered a wildly dangerous gathering. Prince 

3H 



AND AGAIN CHANGES 

Krapotkin might have a bomb in the tail pockets of 
his black frock-coat, and as for Messrs. Tillett, Burns, 
and Mann, there was no knowing whether they would 
not slay all the customers in the restaurant with single 
blows of their enormous fists. 

"We must destroy! We must destroy!" Mr. Mann 
exclaimed. 

"On the contrary," Prince Krapotkin replied in 
low tones, "we must take example of the rabbit and 
found communistic settlements." 

So they thundered, and the waiters trembled more 
and more, and there were a great many emotions 
going; as for me, I felt the same emotion of unworthi- 
ness. In those days I had written a fairy tale which 
had met with an enormous, and I suppose deserved, 
success, and I remember that as we walked away 
from under the shelter of the restaurant in torrential 
rains Prince Krapotkin told me that it was a very 
bad, a very immoral book. It dealt entirely with the 
fortunes of kings, princes, the young, the idle, or the 
merely beautiful. And I was so overwhelmed with 
the same sense of unworthiness that, as I was about 
to sink into the wet pavements, it occurred to me that 
I might find salvation by writing a fairy tale all of 
whose heroes and heroines should be labor leaders. 
I did indeed write it — that was exactly twenty years 
ago — and from that day to this I have never been 
able to find a publisher for it. 

But do not let me be misunderstood. I am not by 
21 315 



MEINIORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

any means attempting to condemn Mr. of the 

lecture hall. He got money out of me so that he 
might elevate his brother workmen, and so that he 
might get drunk on the Saturday night. But I am 
convinced that in the atmosphere in which he lived 
the one thing would have been impossible without 
the other. I fancy that no man can be a really moving 
preacher without committing sustaining sins. I am 
quite certain that the trainloads of people from these 
gloomy midland towns contained hundreds of excel- 
lent and respectable persons, all recruiting themselves 
by the orgies of the Saturday night for the cramped 
formalities of Calvanistic worship on the Sunday 
morning. They could not bear the monotony of their 
lives without occasionally letting hell loose, and that 
is really all that there is to it. But there is this much 
more: The other day I went out to post a letter about 
12.30 A.M. Upon the pavement lay a man bathed in 
blood; his pockets had been rifled, his watch was 
gone, his tie-pin was no longer there. 1 understand 
that since that date, some seven months ago, he has 
never recovered his reason, so eff^ectually had he been 
sandbagged. And this happened at a little past 
twelve at night, in one of the broadest, most well-lit, 
and most populous highways of London, the man 
being not forty yards from the entrance to the tube 
station, and not twenty-five from a coffee-stall. It 
had been done so quickly and so silently. As Froissart 
says in his chronicles: "They slew him so peaceably, 

316 



AND AGAIN CHANGES 

that he uttered no word." And the poHce never dis- 
covered a sign of the man's assailants. The point is 
that behind my house for a distance of nearly two miles 
there stretches toward Wormwood Scrubbs Prison a 
long, dreary neighborhood containing all the criminals 
and outcasts of London. This, of course, is a sombre 
comment on the brightness and gayness of which I 
have spoken before. It means, of course, that the 
breaking up of the slums in western London has 
driven these unfortunate populations in a body into 
this now dangerous quarter, just as similar move- 
ments, commercial or economical, drive other classes 
of the conventionally undesirable population into other 
considerable portions of the western regions of London. 



XV 

WHERE WE STAND 

UPON reconsidering these pages I find that I have 
written a jeremiad. Yet nothing could have 
been further from my thoughts when I sat down to 
this book. I said to myself; I am going to try to com- 
pare the world as it appears to me to-day with the 
world as it appeared to me, and as I have gathered 
that it was, a quarter of a century ago. And the 
general impression in my mind was that I should 
make our life of to-day appear to be a constant suc- 
cession of little, not very enduring pleasures; a thing, 
as it were, of lights, bubbles, and little joys — a gnat- 
dance into the final shadows. I want nothing better, 
and assuredly nothing better shall I get. I want 
nothing better than to be in Piccadilly five minutes 
after the clock has struck eleven at night. I shall be 
jammed to the shoulders in an immense mass of 
pleased mankind, all pouring out of the theatres and 
the music halls. We shall move slowly along the 
pavement between Leicester Square and the Circus. 
In that section it will be a little dark, but before us, 
with the shadowed houses making as it were a deep 

318 



WHERE WE STAND 



black canon, there will be immense light. Perhaps 
it will be raining only slightly. All the better, for from 
the purple glow before us light will be reflected on a 
thousand or half a million little points. The innu- 
merable falling drops will gleam, born suddenly out of 
the black heavens. The wet sides of the house walls 
will gleam; the puddles in the roadway will throw 
up gleaming jets as carriage after carriage passes by, 
their sides, too, gleaming. The harness of the horses 
will gleam, the wet wind-shields of the innumerable 
automobiles with the innumerable little drops of rain 
caught upon them will gleam like the fairy cobwebs, 
the cloths of Mary, beset with drops of bright dew. 

I will have upon my arm some one that I like very 
much; so will all the others there. In that short 
passage of darkness there will be innumerable sounds 
of happiness, innumerable laughs, the cries of paper- 
boys, the voices of policemen regulating the massed 
traffic; the voices of coachmen calling to their horses. 
And then we shall come out into the great light of 
Piccadilly. 

No, I ask nothing better of life. Then, indeed, 
among innumerable happy people I shall know that 
we are all going to heaven, and that Turgeniev will 
be of the company. 

Such indeed was my frame of mind when I sat down 
to this book, and so it remains. But yet, my jeremiad! 
I have personally nothing to grumble at; I dislike no 
one in this wide world. If anybody ever did me an 

319 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

injury it was so slight a one that I have forgotten all 
about it. Yet, in this frame of mind of a perfect 
optimism — for my fellow-creatures are all too inter- 
esting to be disliked when once one can get the hang 
of them, and if some poor devil desires to steal my 
watch, forge a check upon my bank, or by telling lies 
about me get for himself a "job" or an appointment 
or an honor that might well be mine, surely that man's 
need is greater than my own, since he will commit an 
act of wrong to satisfy it — yet in this frame of mind of 
a perfect optimism I seem to have written a jeremiad. 
I have praised the seventies, the eighties, and the 
nineties; I have cast mud at our teens. I remain 
unrepentant. I take nothing back; what I have 
written is the exact truth. And yet . . . 

To-day we have a comparative cleanliness, a com- 
parative light; we have as it were reduced everything 
in scale, so that no longer are we little men forced to 
run up and down between the mighty legs of intoler- 
able moralists like Ruskin or Carlyle or Tolstoy, to 
find ourselves dishonorable graves. We are the 
democracy, the stuff to fill graveyards, and our day 
has dawned. For brick we have terra-cotta, for evil- 
smelling petroleum lamps we have bright and fume- 
less light; for the old Underground that smelled and 
was full of sulphur vapors we have bright, clean, and 
white tubes. And these things are there for the poor- 
est of us. And yet — a jeremiad! 

Is this only because one sees past times always in 

320 




THOMAS CARLYLE 



WHERE WE STAND 



the glamour of romance which will gild for us even 
a begrimed and overcrowded third-class smoking 
carriage of the Underground ? No, I do not think 
that it is only because of this. I would give a great 
deal to have some of the things, some of the people, 
some of the atmosphere of those days — to have them 
now. But nothing in the world would make me go 
back to those days if I must sacrifice what now I have. 
We are civilized; we are kindly; we have an immense 
deference for one another's feelings; we never tread 
upon each other's corns; we never shout our political 
opinions in public conveyances; we never say a word 
about religion, because we are afraid of hurting some 
one else's feelings. We are civilized — used to living in 
a city; we are polite, fitted to live in a 770X19; we are 
polished by the constant rubbing up against each 
other — all we millions and millions who stream back- 
ward and forward all the day and half the night. 
We could not live if we had rough edges; we could 
not ever get so much as into a motor-'bus if we tried 
to push in out of our turn. We are Demos. 

And how much this is for a rather timid man who 
would never get into any 'bus if it were a matter of 
pushing — how much this is I realized some years ago 
when I spent some time in the close society of a num- 
ber of very learned Germans. It was terrible to me. 
I felt like a white lamb — the most helpless of creatures, 
among a set of ferocious pirates. It was not so much 
that I could never remember any of their bristling 

321 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

titles; that did not matter. It would have mattered 
if I could ever have got a word into a conversation, 
but I never could. My voice was too low; I was used 
to the undertones of our London conversations, where 
we all speak in whispers for fear of being overheard 
and thus hurting somebody's feelings. 

But these German savants were simply pirates. 
They were men who had issued savagely forth into 
unknown regions and had *'cut out" terrific pieces 
of information. There did not appear to be one of 
them who did not know more than I did about my 
own subjects. They could put me right about the 
English language, the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the 
British constitution, the reign of Henry VIII., or the 
Elizabethan dramatists. They knew everything, but 
it was as if they had acquired, as if they held, their 
knowledge ferociously. I did not know that there 
were left in the world men so fierce. 

Take German philologists. These are formidable 
people. To set out upon the history of a word is an 
adventurous and romantic thing. You find it in 
London or in Gottingen to-day. You chase it back 
to the days of Chaucer, when knights rode abroad in 
the land. You cross the Channel with it to the court 
of Charlemagne at Aix. You go back to Rome and 
find it in the mouth of Seneca. Socrates utters it in 
your hearing, then it passes back into prehistoric 
times, landing you at last in a dim early age among 
unchronicled peoples, somewhere in the Pamirs, on 

322 



WHERE WE STAND 



the roof of the world, at the birth of humanity. Yes, 
a romantic occupation — but, in a sense, piratical. 
For why otherwise should a comfortable and agreeable 
gentleman over a large pot of beer become simply 
epileptic when one suggests that the word ** sooth'* 
may have some connection with the French sus, the 
perfect participle of savoir, which comes from the 
Latin scire ? Personally I care little about the matter. 
It is interesting in a mild way, but that is all. But 
my friend became enraged. He became more enraged 
than I have ever seen in the case of a learned gentle- 
man. You see, some rival Captain Kidd or some 
rival Francis Drake had enunciated the theory as to 
the word "sooth" which I had invented on the spur 
of the moment. Individualism in fact flourishes in 
Germany still in a way that died out of England when 
Ruskin died and Carlyle died. And being badgered, 
in my civilized timidity, by these formidable and 
learned persons, I feel very much as I used to feel 
when as a boy I was browbeaten by the formidable 
great figures that flourished when Victoria was Queen. 
Perhaps it is only in England that we have lost interest 
in great subjects, or perhaps it is that we know better 
how to live, since it takes all sorts to make a world. 
In an English drawing-room I should never think of 
abusing a Protestant, a Nonconformist, a Jew, or a 
Liberal. I should never think of airing my own 
opinions. There might — probably there would — be 
representatives of all shades in the room. In a mild 

323 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

way I should call myself a sentimental Tory and a 
Roman Catholic. Now in a German drawing-room 
I have never been for more than ten minutes without 
hearing the most violent abuse of Roman Catholics, of 
Jews, of Protestants, of Liberals, or of Reactionaries, 
according to the tastes or ideas of my hosts. This 
makes society more entertaining, more colored, but 
much more tiring. Good Friday before last I gave 
a lunch to four men at my London club. I passed 
the meat as a matter of habit, of good manners, of 
what you will. What was my astonishment to dis- 
cover that each of my guests passed the meat. In 
short, each of us five was actually a Roman Catholic 
of a greater or less degree of earnestness. Yet, al- 
though we were all five fairly intimate, meeting fre- 
quently and talking of most of the things that men 
talk about, we were not any one of us aware of the 
other's religious belief. This, I think, would be 
impossible anywhere but in London, and it is just 
for that reason that London of to-day is such a rest- 
ful place to live in. 

But no doubt it is just for that reason that this 
book of mine has turned out to be a jeremiad. We 
don't care. We don't care enough about anything 
to risk hurting each other's feelings. As a man I find 
this delightful, and it is the only position that, in a 
democracy, mankind can take up if it is to live. For 
the arts, the sciences, thought, and all the deeper things 
of this life are matters very agitating. We are a prac- 

324 



WHERE WE STAND 



deal people, but it is impossible to be practical in the 
things both of heaven and of earth. There is no 
way to do it. We are materially practical when we 
arrange our literature upon the scale of the thousand 
words. But we cannot then be practical when it 
comes to the machinery of the books we produce. 
We cannot pay any attention to that matter at all. 
A book has outhnes, has ribs, has architecture, has 
proportion. These things are called, in French, tech- 
nique. It is significant that in English there is no 
word for this. It is significant than in England a 
person talking about the technique of a book is 
laughed to scorn. The English theory is that a writer 
is a writer by the grace of God. He must have a pen, 
some ink, a piece of paper, and a table. Then he must 
put some vine-leaves in his hair and write. When he 
has written 75,000 words he has a book. 

Yes, we are an extraordinary nation. It seems 
rather wonderful to me that, practical as we are, 
we cannot see that since every book has its machinery 
the best book will be produced by a man who has 
paid some attention to the machinery of books. But 
no; we roar with laughter at the very mention of the 
word technique. The idea of Flaubert spending hours, 
days, or even weeks in finding the right word is suf- 
ficient to send us happy to bed, in a frame of mind 
beatifically lulled by superior knowledge. We know 
that a book consists of 75,000 words. It does not 
surely matter what those words are as long as in our 

325 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

mind we have had a great moral purpose and in our 
hair those vine-leaves. A practical people! 

So, with our 75,000 words under our arm, we set 
forth in search of fame. And this we know we can 
only achieve if our book will forward some social 
purpose. For it is necessary for us to prove that we 
are earnest men. To be a good writer is nothing. 
No, it is worse than nothing, for it generally leads — 
in nine cases out of ten it leads — to the divorce courts. 
So that we must espouse some ** cause" in our books. 
It does not much matter what it is. Personally I am 
an ardent, I am an enraged, suffragette. So far I 
have not found that this fact has led to my books 
selling one copy more. But I hope that when Miss 
Pankhurst is Prime Minister of England she will 
nominate me to some humble post — say that of keeper 
of her official wardrobe. I shall be a gentleman by 
prescription, and my immense earnestness will be 
recognized at last, and publicly. 

"For the thing to do" — I am taking the liberty 
now of addressing a supposititious and earnest young 
writer — "the thing to do if you would succeed is to 
identify yourself prominently with some 'cause* or 
with some faith. I myself have had in literature a suc- 
cess which I am quite certain I do not deserve. My 
books cannot by any measure of means be called pop- 
ular, and they are of all shapes and sizes. There will 
be thirty-seven of them by the time this reaches your 
young hands. In the first place, because I have a 

326 



WHERE WE STAND 



German name, I am usually taken for a Jew, and 
this has secured for me a soHd body of Jewish support. 
In the second place, a great number of Roman Cath- 
olics know that I am a Roman Catholic — though a 
very poor one — and they support me too. I also get 
some support from socialists who think me a socialist, 
and some — but not as much as I deserve — from 
suffragettes. All the support I get comes from these 
accidental labels. The quality of my writing is 
nothing. So that, oh, young writer, I implore you 
very earnestly to take some label. Become the cham- 
pion of the Church of England; write a novel all of 
whose characters are curates, in which there is no love 
interest, and all the villains must be Nonconformist 
grocers who refuse to give credit to the curates, so that 
they all die of starvation. Something like that." 

But I am afraid I am letting something of the bitter 
scorn that I feel peep through. That would be a pity. 
The fact is, all the tendencies that I have described 
are inevitable in our time. No one is to blame; it 
can't be cured; it can't be helped. I can't blame 
the literary editor who turns his pages slowly into a 
vehicle for catching advertisements. There are some 
who do not, but they will go, and it is the same story 
all the world over. The newspapers cannot live 
without advertisements, so that I cannot blame the 
newspaper proprietor who sacks the editor who does 
not bring him advertisements. If not to-day, then 
to-morrow, there will not be a newspaper left of which 

327 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 

any man might not be the editor if he could guarantee 
from some other firm in which he is interested £30,000 
a year's worth of advertisements. It is sad, it is tragic, 
but there it is. Neither do I blame the pubHsher 
who has cut me down to my one set of proofs that 
must be marked here with red ink, here with blue. 
He must do it. At his throat, too, is the knife that is 
at all our throats. 

Life is so good, life may be so pleasant; must I not 
taste of it, and my publisher, and my newspaper 
proprietor, and my literary editor, and my advertise- 
ment canvasser ? All of us ? Yes, assuredly, we are 
all of us going to the Alhambra, and the Prime Minis- 
ter w^ill be of the company. 

Life is good nowadays; but art is very bitter. That 
is why, though the light whirls and blazes still over 
Piccadilly, this book has become a jeremiad. For 
upon the one side I love life. On the other hand, 
Hokusai in the later years of his life was accustomed 
to subscribe himself " The Old Man Mad About Paint- 
ing." So I may humbly write myself down a man 
getting on for forty, a little mad about good letters. 
For the world is a good place, but the letters that I 
try to stand up for are about to die. Will any take 
their place ? Who knows ? But as for anything else, 
let me put down the words of the Ritter Olaf, who was 
also about to die. He had married the king's daughter 
and was to be beheaded for it when he came out of 
church. But he begged his life till midnight so that 

328 



WHERE WE STAND 



he might dance amid the torches of his bridal banquet. 
Then he went to death saying: 

"Ich segne die Sonne, ich segne den Mond 
Und die Sterne, die am Himmel schweifen; 
Ich segne auch die Vogelein 
Die in den Liiften pfeifen. 

Ich segne das Meer, ich segne das Land, 
Und die Blumen auf der Aue; 
Ich segne die Veilchen, sie sind so sanft 
Wie die Augen meiner Fraue. 

Ihr Veilchenaugen meiner Frau, 
Durch euch verher' ich mein Leben! 
Ich segne auch den Holunderbaum, 
Wo du dich mir ergeben." 

Brave words! 



I 



INDEX 



Academy, Royal, 15, 17 
j^neid, 180 
Albemarle Street, 43 
Almayer's Folly, 251 
Amazing Marriage, The, 199 
Amber Witch, The, 201 
Arabian Nights, 277 
Arnoux, Madame, 204 
Ascot, 270 

Athenaeum Club, 292 
AthencBum, The, 43, 109, iii, 

194, 195, 196, 205, 238 
"Aurea Catena," 214 

"B. V." (James Thomson), 42 

Bach, J. S., 86 

Bacon, Francis, 268 

Bacon, Friar, 180 

Barber, Burton, 214 

Barrie, J. M., 251 

"Battle of Prague, The," 189 

Bauer, Carolina, 83 

Beata, Beatrix, 208 

Beau Brummel, 247 

Bedford Park, 38 

Beethoven, L. van, 21, 86 

Beeton, Mrs., 189 

Berlin, 47, 48 

Bismarck, Prince, 56 

Bleak House, 179 

Blessed Damozel, The, 59, 60, 

197 
Blmd, Miss Mathilde, 56, 57 
Bloomsbury, xix, 39, 71, 72 
Boddington, Mr., 153 
Boer War, 193, 260, 270, 271, 

274 
Bond Street, 295, 296 
Booksellers' Row, 143 
Botticelli, AUessandro, 154 



Boucher, Arthur, 152 

Bournemouth, 113 

Brown, Cimabue, 104, 284 

Brown, D. G. R., 238 

Brown, Dr. John, 212 

Brown, Ford, 212, 213 

Brown, Ford Madox, 2, 3, 4, 5, 
8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 
28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 55, 
56, 131, 142, 144, 148, 149, 
152, 153. 154, 155. 156, 157. 
158, 159, 163, 164, 177. 213. 
214, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 
224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 
234, 235, 236, 245, 246, 247. 
248, 249, 250, 262, 314 

Brown, Madox, exhibition, 228 

Brown, Oliver Madox, 42, 49, 

^ 55. 56, 88 

Browning, Robert, xiii, 22, 40, 

4.2 2 2 J. 

"Bugle Calls, The," 213 
Bundelcund Board, 16 
Bungay, Friar, 180 
Burne- Jones, Lady, 8, 24, 223 
Burne- Jones, Sir E., 3, 7, 8, 24, 

148, 169, 207, 219, 221, 222, 

230, 253, 264 
Burns, John, 314, 315 

Caine, Hall, 37 

Campanini, 83 

Carlyle, xiii, xv, xvi, 21, 45, 

46, 49, 55, 72, 82, 181, 182, 

3". 2,'^Z' 320, 324 
Charles X., 203 
Charlotte Street, 161 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 276 
Chelsea, 38, 49, 54 
Cheyne Walk, 29, 30 



22 



33' 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 



City of Dreadful Night, The, 40, 

253 
Clod, Edward, 29 
Coffin, Sir Isaac, 213 
CoUinson, 238 
Conrad, Joseph, 251, 265 
Constable, John, 28, 228 
Cornelius, 247 
Corot, J. B. C., 229 
Craigie, Mrs., 251 
Crane, Stephen, 58 
Crane, Walter, 133 
Crimean War, 213 
Crockett, S. R., 251 
Crosland, T. W. H., 254 
Cross, John, 27 
"Crucifixion," Hilton's, 27 
Cruikshank, George, 176 
Crystal Palace, 247 
Cuchullain Saga, 266, 276, 278 

Daily Chronicle, 43, 271 

Daily Graphic, 1 7 

Daily News, 271 

Daily Telegraph, 43 

Daisy Alillcr, 277 

D'Annuncio, Signor, 59 

Dante, 161, 183, 276 

Darwin, Charles, 241 

Davis, 28 

De Boigne, Madame, 166 

Debussy, Claude, 97 

Delaine, T. T., 191, 192 

Deinon Barber, 253 

De Morgan, William, 28 

Dick Harkaivay, 253 

Dickens, Charles, 10, 92, 154, 

177. 179. 237. 241 
Dickinson, Messrs, 213 
Dicksee, Frank, 225 
Dinorah, 83, 84 
Dolly Dialogues, 200, 252, 277 
Don Quixote, 119 
Dreams, 252 
Drury Lane, 21 
Du Camp, Maxime, 165, 166, 

202 
Dudley Gallery, i 53 
Du Maurier, George, 104, 164, 

284 
Dumas, Alexandre, 165 



Eliot, George, 72, 73 
Elizabeth, Queen, 62, 323 
Endsleigh Gardens, 114 
English Review, 29 
" Eustace Conyers," 178 
Euston Road, 41 

Fabian Society, 140, 141 
Fathers aiid Children, 206, 277, 

27S 
Faustus, Dr., 180 
Field, The, 271 
Figaro, 119 
Fitzroy Square, x, i, 14, 28, 39, 

45. 56 

Flaubert, Gustave, 165, 183, 
191, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 
206, 207, 208, 210, 264, 325 

Fletcher, John, 268 

Fletcher, Mr. Clara, 109, 112, 

113 
Fletcher, Mrs. Clara, 109, 117 
Frankfurter Zeitung, 47 
Franz, Robert, 86, 107 
Fraser's Magazine, 176 
Frederick the Great, 212 

Gainsborough, Thomas, 228 
"Gallery of Pigeons, A," 53 
Galsworthy, John, 311 
Gambart, Mr., 213, 243 
Garnett, Edward, 75, 76, 77, 
169, 194, 195, 201, 202, 250 
Garnett, Mrs., 208 
Gautier, Th., 165, 206 
George, Henry, 311, 313 
Germany, Emperor of, xvi, xvii 
" Giornale Times," 93 
Gladstone, W. E., 200, 251 
Glenquorch, Sir John, 196, 205 
"Goblin Market, 60, 61 
Goethe, xvi, 45, ^7, 276 
Goodge Street, 135 
Gosse, Edmund, 42 
Gottingen, 48 
Gower Street, 39, 41, 282 
Grafton Gallery, 14, 228 
Grahame, Cunningham, iig 
Grant, 238, 241 
Greenwich Observatory, 136 



332 



INDEX 



Hake, Gordon, 42 
Hammersmith, 293, 3 to 
Hannay, James, 175, 177, 178 
Hardy, Thomas, 199 
Harte, Bret, 40 
Hazhtt, William, 175 
Heine, H., 209 
Heinemann, William, 200 
Henley, W. E., 193, 194, 197, 

215, 216, 217, 218, 229, 252, 

260, 264, 265, 267 
Hennessy, 120, 121, 122, 128, 

129 
Henry VIII., 322 
Hogarth, William, 154, 229 
Holbein, Hans, 154 
Holborn Restaurant, 314 
Homer, 183, 209 
Hood, Thomas, 175 
Hope, Anthony, 200, 251 
House of the Gentlefolk, 206 
Howell, Charles Augustus, 7, 

^ 150. 151 

Hudson, W., 208 

Hueffer, Dr. Francis, 10, 11, 
48, 49 

Hueffer, Mrs. Francis, 57 

Hughes, Arthur, 5, 226 

Hugo, Victor, 86, 165 

Hunt, Holman, xiii, xiv, 22, 

, 23, 24, 144, 145, 146, 154, 
160, 163, 164, 169, 214, 230, 
232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 
238, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 
264 

Huxley, T. H., 241 

Hythe, 113 

Idler, The, 254 

Idylls of the King, 181 

Ivanhoe, 277 



James, Henry, 265 
Jerome, J. K., 311 
Jerrold, Douglas, 175, 178 
Joachim, 102, 103 
John Inglesant, 200 
Johnson, Samuel, 175 
Jump to Glory Jane, 199 
Junius, 195 



Kelmscott House, 133 
Kelmscott House Socialistic 

League, 223 
Kensington Gardens, 279, 300 
King Lear, 277 
Kipling, Rudyard, 251, 253 
Krapotkin, Pince, 314, 315 

Lambeth, 311 
Langham Hotel, 134 
Last of England, The, 2 
" Lauter Klatsch," 94 
"Lear's Nonsense Verses," 49 
L' Education Sentimentale, 202, 

203, 210 
Leicester Square, 318 
Leighton, Sir Frederick, 225 
Lessing, G. E., 87 
Leys, Baron, 247 
Life of Frederick the Great, 181, 

182 
"Light of the World, The," 214, 

237 
Lmd, Jenny, 82, 83 
Linnell, 28 

Liszt, Franz, 45, 80, 81, 82 
Lord Ormont and His Awiinta, 

199 
Lorna Doone, 199, 200 
Lost Shepherd, 7 
Louis Philippe, 203 
Lucca, Pauline, 205 

Maccoll, Mr. N., 194, 195, 196 
Macdonald, Miss (Lady Burne- 

Jones), 24 
Macleod, Fiona, 41 
Maclise, Daniel, 176 
Madame Bovary, 183, 202 
Mademoiselle Ixe, 251 
Madox, Tristram, 177, 178 
Maison Tellier, La, 277 
Malibran, 82, 83 
Malvern, 82, 96 

Man Who Would Be King, 253 
Manchester frescoes, 227 
Manchester Guardian, 271 
Manet, 229 
Mann, Tom, 315 
Mapleson, Colonel, 83 
Marises, 229 



333 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 



Marochetti, Baron, 23 
^larshall, P. P., 3, 7, 220 
Marston, Philip, 41, 42 
Marzials, Theo., 42, 53, 54 
Maupassant, Guy de, 191, 206, 

276 
Maurice, Professor, 23 
Mazzini, Joseph, 56, 162, 248 
McCabe, Joseph, 311 
Meinhold, 201 
Metiesirel, Le, 47 
Meredith, George, 28, 20, 30, 31, 

143, igg, 230 
Merimee, Prosper, 165 
"Messiah, The," g6, 97 
Mickleham, Lady, 200 
Millais, J. E., 10, 23, 24, 144, 

146, 214, 233, 234, 238, 240, 
241, 264 

Millar, Peter, 26, 27 

Miller, Joaquin, 39, 40 

Montgomery, Robert, 198 

Moonlight Sonata, 81 

Moreau, Frodoric, 204 

Morning Post, 271 

Morris & Co., 3, 7, 31, 207, 219, 

222, 224 
Morris, William, 3, 4. 10, 18, 19, 

24, 116, 133, 134. 143. 145- 

147, 148, 153, 164, 169, 219, 
220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 
226, 230, 246, 247, 250, 254, 
255, 264. 265, 311 

Mozart, 21, 86 

Munroe, 2^ 

Music and Moonlight, 112 

"My True Ix)ve Hath My 

Heart," 53 
Mysteres de Paris, 201, 228 

Napoleon III., 161, 203 
Napoleon, xvi, xvii, 170, 197, 

203, 212 
National Gallery, 157, 293 
National Observer, 193 
National Review, 252 
New Quarterly Review, 48 
New Re-view, 193 
Newcome, Colonel, 2, 13, 16, 19, 

207 
Newcomes, The, 2 



News frofn Nowhere, 133, 266 
Nicholas Nickleby, 277 
Nigger of the Narcissus, 252 
Notes upon Sheep Folds, 181 

O'CONNELL, D.^NIEL, 163 

Olaf, Ritter. 328 
Oliver Twist, 119, 179 
Only a Subaltern, 253 
Open Boat, The, qS 
O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 42, 43, 

106, 112 
Ossian, 266 
Ouida, 305, 306 
Outlook, The, 254 
Overbeck, 247 

Pair of Blue Eyes, 199 

Pall Mall Magazine, 216 

Pankhurst, Miss, 326 

Parker, Peter, 177 

Paxton, 247 

Pepper, 45 

Pcpys' Diary, 80 

Peter Pan, 46 

Piatti, 102 

Piccadilly Circus, 318 

Portland, Duke of, 247 

Portland Place, 19, 130 

" Pretty Baa-Lambs, The," 229, 

Prince Consort, 18 
Punch, 104 
Punch, 164 

QutLTER, H.\RRY, I3I, 154, I55, 

156, 199 

Rae, George, 26 
Ralston, 206 
Ramsgate, 177, 189 
Rathbone, Harold, 160 
Red Badge of Courage, The, 58 
Red Lion Square, 4 
"Return Home, The," 213 
Riach, Angus, 175 
Richmond, 303. 305 
Richter, Jean Paul, 87 
Robinson, Miss Mary, 115 
" Romeo and Juliet," 314 
Romney Marsh, 144 



334 



INDEX 



Rossetti, Arthur, 114, 115, 116, 
130 

Rossetti, Christina, 39, 42, 58, 
60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 
71. 73- 74. 7 5. 76, 144, 202, 230 

Rossetti, D. G., 3, 5, 6, i8, 22, 

23. 29, 30. 31. 32. 33. 39. 42, 
45, 49, 58, 59, 60, 70, 71, 106, 
143, 144, 147, 148, 149, 150, 
151, 152, 161, 163, 197, 198, 
199, 201, 206, 207, 214, 219, 
220, 221, 222, 234, 235, 244, 
245, 246, 264 
Rossetti, Lucy, 112, 116, 230 
Rossetti, Mrs. William, 57 
Rossetti, Olive, 114, 115, 130 
Rossetti, W. M., 7, 21, 22, 23, 
24, 29, 146, 161, 201, 247, 248 
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 73 
Rowley, Charles, 158 
Rudall, Mr., 78 
Ruskin, John, xiii, xiv, 6, 11, 
12, 22, 23, 24, 61, 62, 63, 65, 
181, 199, 230, 311, 312, 320, 
323 

Saga of Grettir the Strong, 266 

Sainte Beuve, 193 

Salutation of Beatrice, The, 208 

Saturday, Review, 271 

Saviour in the Temple, 169, 170 

Scalchi, 83 

Scape Goat, The, 200, 201 

Schiller, F., xvi, 45, 87 

Schreiner, Olive, 251, 252 

Scott, Sir Walter, 147, 148 

Sesame aitd Lilies, 63, 181 

Seymour, Jane, 80 

Shaen, Mr., 162 

Shakespeare, William, 183, 209, 

268, 275, 276 
Sharp, William, 41 
Shaw, Bernard, 134, 141, 142 
Shelley, P. B., 248 
Shields, Frederick, 157, 158, 

159, 160 
Ships that Pass in the Night, 200 
Siddall, Miss, 22, 28 
Sidonia the Sorceress, 201 
Sinclair, Upton, 311 
Sir Hugh the Heron, 147 



Smith, Albert, 252, 287 
"Songs of the Sierras," 39 
" Songtide," 41 
Spectator, 43, 271 
Spencer, Herbert, 292 
Standard, 190 
Sterne, Laurence, 158 
Stevens, F. G., 195 
Stevens, G. W., 193 
Stevenson, R. A. M., 193, 228, 

229, 230 
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 59, 

123, 126, 216, 218, 229 
Stone, Frank, 238 
Stones of Venice, 6 
Story of an African Farm, 200 
Strand, 295, 296 
Strauss, 97, 102 
Sue, Eugene, 201 
Sweeney Todd, 253 
.Swinburne, A. C, 6, 7, 29, 42, 

44, 106, 147, 148, 170, 181, 

199, 230, 264 

Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 40, 

no, 112, 181 
Thackeray, W. M., i, 188 
Thackeray, Miss, 300 
Thatched House Club, 78 
Thomson, James ("V. B."), 40, 

253 
Three Choirs Festival, 95, 96, 

97 
Three Men in a Boat, 252 
Tillett, Ben, 314 
Times, 11, 43, 46, 78, 107, 131, 

191, 192, 271, 285 
Titian, 154 

To-Day, 251, 252, 254 
Tolstoy, Leo, xiv, 320 
Tonge, 28 

Torch, The, 130, 135, 141 
Tottenham Court Road, 136, 

137 
Trafalgar Square, 139, 293 
"Trenches Before Sevastopol, 

In," 213 
Trial of foan of Arc, The, 277 
Tribuna, The, 47 
"Triumph of the Innocents, 

The," 160 



335 



MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS 



"Troopship Sails, The," 213 
Turgeniev, 205, 206, 207, 208, 

209, 265 
Turner, J. M. W., 28, 228 
Twain, Mark, 40 
"Twickenham Ferry," 53 

Uncle Tom's Cabin, 118 
Un Cceur Sintf>l€, 211 
Universal Review, 131, 199 

Victoria, Queen, xvi, xvii, 10, 

63, III, 310, 311 
Virgil, 276 

Wagner, Richard, 86, 92, 98, 

99, 100, 107 
Wallace, William, 148 
Watson, William, 170 
Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 42, 

195, iq8, 222 
Webb, Philip, 220 



Wells, H. G., 251, 311 
Westminster Abbey, 80, 153 
Westminster Gazette, 200, 252, 

271 
Wheels of Chance, 252 
Whistler, J. McN., 28, 33 
Wilde, Oscar, 4, 164, 166, 167, 

168, 169, 170, 207 
Wilhelm Meister, 46 
Windsor Castle, 286 
Windus, 28 
Woburn Square, 39 
Woolner, Thomas, 23 
Worcester, 96 
Work, 2, 169 

Working Man's College, 23 
Wormwood Scrubbs Prison, 3 1 7 
" Wounded," 213 

Yeats, W. B., 41 

Zangwill, Israel, 170, 251 
Zola, Emil, 206 



THE END 



J 



2056 








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